


Pick Up A Polliwog

by Run_Ravager_Run



Category: Guardians of the Galaxy (Movies)
Genre: (It's not too emotional as Yondu has no idea wtf's going on), (by Ravager standards), (in future chapters), Alien Biology, Alien Sex, BUT NOT THE SORT YOU EXPECT, Blow Jobs, Deepthroating, Domestic Fluff, Dysfunctional Family, Established Relationship, Family Drama, Fingerfucking, Fix-It, Fluff and Humor, Fluff and Smut, Knotting, M/M, Miscarriage, Mpreg, Porn With Plot, Post-Canon, was this an excuse to write about Alien Genitalia again?, why yes, yes it was
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-02
Updated: 2019-11-11
Packaged: 2020-06-02 16:02:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 21,874
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19444807
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Run_Ravager_Run/pseuds/Run_Ravager_Run
Summary: Stakar sends Yondu and Kraglin to Alpha Centaurii to mine for Yaka/connect with his roots/etc. It doesn't go according to plan.With babies on board and his place among the Ravager clans contested, Yondu might wind up losing the family he's fought so hard to regain.





	1. Chapter 1

First time back on the homeworld since the Kree ships wubbed slowly out of atmosphere, parting the canopy with the downbeat from their thrusters, and Yondu's only thought was _'kinda damp'_.

He would bitch about it, if his skin didn't feel _fucking amazing_.

“Sir?”

Kraglin tramped out of their cave with the bag tossed over one shoulder. He wore his exoskelesuit under his clothes: a dozen electrode points and associated titanium wires that laced his skin in a metallic shibari mesh, preventing his low-grav Hraxian bones from crumbling the moment he set foot on a planet. Also meant he could lug about a parcel of mining gear larger than he was, without any discernible effort.

Show off.

Yondu tilted his head to bask in the mist. The humidity opened his pores, tingling pleasantly over skin that had suffered too long under recycled ship air. “What's up, boy?”

Three times a day, clouds swarmed overhead like writhing bedsheets, so violent in their thrashing that you expected one of the corners to slide back and reveal the mating monsters beneath. Then the rains began. Lashings of it, great soaking waves that plastered the forests to the earth.

It shredded straight through the weaker trees; would probably knock a grown man flat on his face if he got caught without shelter.

The planet's densely-woven canopy layer acted as a defence mechanism, a shell of interwoven foliage. While it made the undergrowth a serious of dank and musty grottos, sticky with fungi and dripping with swamp, it stopped the ground from being churned up, the trees uprooted, and the rivers running full-spate every time the clouds burst.

“Wanna hurry it up so we can split this rock.” Stopping beside Yondu, Kraglin rested his sack on his feet in an effort to keep it from soaking up mud. “Ain’t never been so sweaty. Feels like my jumpsuit's gonna slide right off.”

“Could always stick ya in a loincloth?”

“Pass. There's – ugh!” Kraglin swatted at the skeeter that landed on his shoulder, before it could jab its inch-long proboscis through leather and skin. “Bugs! Why d'you need so many bugs!”

Yondu shrugged. “They don't seem to like me.”

“That's cause yer _evolved_ for this shit, sir! Yer blood's poisonous, or whatnot. I'm a fuckin' buffet!”

He still slipped up sometimes. Still shaped that 'sir' on muscle memory, though they hadn't been in charge of a Ravager horde since Yondu clocked a plasma bolt to the implant, courtesy of Gamora's freak sister _._

 _Independent contractors._ That's what they were now. Bounty hunters and general ne'er-do-wells, according to the Nova Corps' dictionary. Weren't neither one of them higher than the other.

But Kraglin had his routines, and he got fussy if Yondu brought 'em into question. For most hours of the day, 'Sir' it was.

“Quit bitchin'.” Yondu tapped him upside the back of the head, avoiding the nodes that strengthened his paper-thin skull. “Already told ya, I ain't gonna let nothin' eat ya.”

Kraglin heaved his bag back onto one shoulder, following Yondu along the boar track that cut through the thicket of creepers and glossy blue leaves. “You also said if I were dumb enough to fall in the swamp, you'd laugh.”

Did he? Yondu didn't remember much from the night Stakar issued them this contract, other than that he’d holed up in his cabin with a celebratory crate of moonshine.

Kraglin, by dint of not sharing the same fraught history with the Ogord factions, didn't need to get rip-roaringly drunk to process the fact they'd been absorbed back into the clans. Ergo, he remembered matters in far clearer detail.

Yondu shook his head at his past self. “Well, I'm tellin’ you now. Anything eats ya, I cut it open an' get'chu out again.”

“If there's anything left.”

Pessimist.

Kraglin sponged sweat from his beard onto the back of his sleeve. They fell into pace beside one another, Yondu slinging a companionable arm over Kraglin's scrawny shoulders. The boar track was broad enough for one stocky Centaurian and his skinny business parter to saunter abreast – which should make Yondu more concerned about the size of the boar. But he had his arrow at his hip. Weren't nothing that could hurt him, here.

Well, that was a lie. The natives could. But if any had survived the Kree Plagues, they didn't gather in great numbers.

Scanners showed tiny enclaves, pockets of heat in the jungle. Might be a few families holed up here and there. But considering what happened last time visitors came – the free trade of goods and slaves devolving into a sputtering and hacking influenza, the children coughing hard enough to rattle their lungs apart – the surviving Centaurians wouldn't be keen to confront the new arrivals.

Even if Yondu was one of their own.

“You want this done fast?” he asked Kraglin. “We do it fast. In an'out, slick as a prick.”

“Don’t think that’s what Ogord had in mind. Probably wanted you to come out here to _reconnect with yer heritage,_ or some shit.”

Yondu glared at the canopy. He chose his words with care, and managed not to grind his teeth audibly between them. “My _heritage_ sold me to the Kree. Ain't nothin' I want from this rock, 'cept what’ll earn us money.”

It did Kraglin good to hear that. He stopped walking like he expected the ground to give out from under him.

Which meant that when it did, it came as quite the shock.

“Augh!”

Despite his earlier proclamation to the contrary, Yondu laughed. Yondu laughed hard and long, until Kraglin’s burbles stopped and he realized the weight of all their mining equipment must be dragging him down, deeper into the swampy pool his boots had found.

Yondu sighed. He squatted at the edge of the sink hole. The bog might make a fertile breeding ground for mushrooms, but Kraglin, despite his stringy stature and waxy complexion, wasn’t actually fungal in nature.

A bubble teetered on the surface. Burst. Yondu wiped the splatter from his cheek, then rolled up his sleeves.

He needn’t have bothered. Elbow-deep wasn’t enough. By the time Yondu located the familiar clump of a mohawk – clumpier than ever, thanks to the mud – he was as thoroughly daubed as Kraglin.

He hauled him out, thanking the stars that low-gravvers came in lightweight. Then groaned, because if he could heave Kraglin up from the bottom of a three-meter pool with no discernible effort, it meant…

“Ya dropped the mine gear!”

Kraglin spat mud. He coughed, propelled a brackish fountain from each nostril, pulled a slug out of his left ear, and coughed some more. “Bigger things on my mind, sir.”

“Well, thas just great.” Yondu wiped his muddy face on a muddier hand. “How’re we s’pposed to dig the yaka out now?”

Kraglin looked even more bedraggled and miserable than usual. Or perhaps he was elated at the prospect of diving back in after their equipment? Hard to tell, under all that muck. “Do we gotta bother?”

Yondu knew what he meant. This was a ‘mission’ only in the most condescending sense of the word: a milk-run that they were being paid far too handsomely for.

As soon as Yondu hopped out the bacta tube, having convinced Martinex to leave him in a few extra days so the cellular regeneration smoothed out the worst of his wrinkles, Stakar packed them off to Alpha Centauri in search of yaka ore. He claimed he was making some sort of deal with the Collector. Yondu knew better. The big kahuna just didn’t want to say _sorry for banishing you for thirty years and never getting to know my grandson; sorry for collering you during the trial and saying you were as bad as the Kree;_ and _sorry for telling you I regretted cutting your chains in the first place._

Y’know. Little things like that.

Yondu would’ve refused the job out of spite, had it not been for the cheque. Exorbitant didn’t begin to cover it. He and Kraglin needed money to get them back on their feet. But there were other folks to do business with than Stakar Ogord.

“Fuck the yaka.” Yondu stood. He pulled on Kraglin's arm until it unfolded to its full, dripping length. A careful application of counterweight, Yondu keeping his heels planted so as not to take a dive of his own, and Kraglin blossomed from his crouch like a weed breaking the crust on a sewage sump. “There’s a river nearby. Gonna dunk ya in it til’ I can’t smell ya.”

Kraglin blew a greasy black bubble. Mud coated his tongue and teeth, and more glued his eyelashes together, plastering his hair to his head. “S’rry ‘bout the mining gear, boss.”

“I forgive ya,” said Yondu generously.

On they walked.

* * *

The boar track opened onto a grotty bayou and further on, as Yondu predicted, a river. The water purled along, shallow enough to wade in near the banks, leaping and splashing over a bed of chipped rocks. The crash of a waterfall echoed nearby, loud enough to reverberate in Yondu’s mechanical crest.

Before Yondu could start stripping down, eager to chip the mud off his face and neck, there was a splash behind him.

“Aw hell. Not again.”

But when he turned, he found Kraglin knelt at the edge of the bayou, not wallowing it. The Hraxian poked the turbid water with a stick. And there, amid the mats of algae and pondweed…

Something poked back.

Yondu cocked his head. He stole closer, navigating the slippery rocks with ease. Instinct informed him it would be easier to strip off his boots and run around barefoot, but Yondu wasn’t quite ready to go native. Hadn’t been thirty years back when he was first freed; sure wasn’t now.

“Whassat?” he asked, squinting into the depths.

Kraglin jabbed his stick about, stirring the soup. He whisked until he collected a candyfloss ball of pondweed, the fronds glistening-damp, slimy with algae.

A tunnel opened beneath them, boring down into the depths. The water shimmered like obsidian, lit from within by a faint green light. Bioluminescence glowed steadier than the sun, which filtered down to them through the rustling leaves, slipping and darting in dapples over their muddy backs.

“I dunno,” Kraglin said. “Jus’ thought I –“

Something _slithered_ , down in the deep.

“What was that? Shit, did ya see that? Sir, I –“

“Shut up.”

Kraglin did.

Yondu took command of the stick. He tapped away the matted stems, waiting for them to reform their pulpy net. Then he dabbled the water further out. Faint distortions in the shadows gave them away; his quarry migrated to the shore.

Prey species then, afraid of any disturbance on the surface.

Assured he wasn't going to receive a hungry lamprey to the face, Yondu flicked the weeds back on themselves.

There!

Yondu grinned, triumphant.

“Holy shit,” Kraglin breathed.

The critters scattered from their silhouettes. But then, the strangest thing happened. They peeped from cover one by one, their black lidless eyes goggling up at the newcomers through the rippling pond. Cautiously, but with growing confidence, they drifted up from the murky depths and poked their noses out, tails wriggling merrily below.

Yondu pointed out the nubs on their sides. “Polliwogs.”

Kraglin shuddered. “Them’s the length of yer hand, sir. I’d hate to see what they'll grow into.”

“Yeah well…” Yondu’s brain could best be described as an intricate cog mechanism. The three biggest cogs, in ascending size, were Kraglin, Peter, and profit. When all three span together, magic was made. When the last of these turned alone, results varied. “We’re gonna find out. You got a scanner?”

Kraglin made a show of patting himself down, then mimed surprise when the search turned up fruitless. “Oh wait – all our gear's at the bottom of the swamp.”

“No worries. They look interestin', and ain't many planets out this way that share biological roots with Alpha Centauri.” He grinned down at the tadpoles, his reflection stretched to grotesquery by the ripples. “Les’ rinse off, head back. Y’know how Collector gets around rare species.”

Kraglin frowned hard enough to crack his muddy facepack.

“Ya sure ya wanna do a trade like this sir?”

He spoke delicately. _Too_ delicately.

Yondu scoffed. “Them’s not _sentient.”_ He poked one in demonstration. It bobbed in the water, then buoyed back up again, tilting its dark shiny face in a parody of curiosity. “Lookit ‘em. Make a cute pet, or somethin’. Some rich bitch can stick one in her handbag.”

Kraglin shuddered. “How can ya _touch_ it? Ya don’t know if it might bite yer finger off!”

“I’m Centaurian, ain’t I? Course I know.”

“You were taken off this planet before ya learnt to talk. You don't know shit.”

Smartass. Yondu made like he never heard.

He stood, wandering along the bank until he found a spot where the water ran clear, Kraglin trotting after him. The soundboard of the jungle engulfed them: the rush of the river, the rustle of the leaves, the cackle of birds in the canopy, the gentle churrs of underbrush mammals...

And the raucous shriek as Yondu scooted his ankle between Kraglin’s and tripped his mate face-first into the drink.

* * *

“You’re sure about this?” An hour later, the pair were as squeaky clean as Ravagers got – not very. They lumbered back from the watering hole, lugging a full pail between them. They’d brought it along to collect rainwater, expecting to camp for at least a week. Instead, the bucket had become home to enough polliwogs to line their sleeves with the Collector’s gold.

The varmints swam over themselves to reach Yondu's side of the bucket, tilting it enough to slop. They didn’t seem all that interested in Kraglin. That or they were afraid of him – the freaky elongated mantis of an alien, eerie pale, whose exoskeleton gave out the occasional burst of sparks in protest at his duple-dunking.

Yondu adjusted his grip, handle chewing into the undersides of his palms. “Course,” he grunted.

“What about Stakar?”

“What about ‘im? We tell him we harvested all the yaka we need, got a pretty price on the way back to base, present the money, result.”

Kraglin nibbled his lip. “Y’know sellin's supposed to be handled centrally…”

Yondu would’ve flapped a dismissive hand, if one wasn’t busy with the bucket and the other wasn’t waving about for balance. “He’ll let me off. Bastard ain’t said one _sorry_ over the whole banishment shtick; I can get away with anything.” He reconsidered, stomping on a wet twig only to be disappointed by the lack of a snap. “Anythin’ ‘cept smugglin’ kids.”

Kragln’s mouth had yet to lose its squiggly, downturned qualities. Yondu sighed.

“I ain’t gonna tell him about the minin’ equipment. If the Collector pays enough, can pretend we got a sweet bargain for that too.”

“An’ if not?”

“Got caught up by a Nova craft, passin’ the stockade. Had to eject all unnecessaries.”

Kraglin’s half of the bucket slumped, as his shoulders wound down from where they squashed his earlobes.

“Thanks, sir.”

He sounded all heartfelt about it too. Course, Kraglin being a tender ten years his junior, he hadn’t been around in the heyday, when Yondu flew his _Warbird_ in formation at Stakar’s right hand side. He only knew the Ravager admiral from stories, most of them Yondu’s, and few positive.

Yondu might have cast the guy in a rather sour light, post-banishment – but then again, he never expected to be welcomed back with open arms.

Was a time when he figured only way Stakar would forgive him was if he was dead. Barrel of a blaster wound up looking mighty friendly because of it, but Yondu’d made a decision decades back, as he lay in his cage under a Kree fortress, returned from a stint in the showerblocks, feeling squeaky clean and all kinds of dirty.

He'd promised himself that if the universe was out to kill him, he wouldn’t do its job for it.

Let them take him screaming and kicking. Not with his tongue bitten off at the bottom of a cage. Not curled in the corner of his cabin with a plasma tunnel bored through his skull.

Dire thoughts didn’t have no place in his head no more. Things were looking up. Quill and him spoke every once in a while, and while a certain awkwardness permeated the conversations - neither wanted to be the first to raise their voice in case the other waked away - they were _making an effort_.

According to the agony aunts, whose Xandarian periodicals sometimes found their way onto Yondu's bedside table, that was all that mattered.

The forgiveness conga didn't stop there. Once they'd gotten this mission under their belt, Marty had invited Yondu to go chug booze at their old favorite taphouse, whose doors had been barred to him for decades. Kraglin got a bit shirky around ol’ disco-ball, which made Yondu all the more determined to go. But perhaps he’d insist on it being the three of them, so his mate didn’t get the wrong idea.

Not that he needed to worry. At the end of the solar cycle, Kraglin stuck by him. Marty didn't.

It'd take more than one drink to unravel that.

The splosh of the critters drew Yondu from his thoughts. He tutted, booping the one that had scrambled highest back into the bucket. It proceeded to glare at him from the bottom of the pile, tail wriggling moodily behind it. Yondu levelled a finger.

“Don'tchu look at me like that.” It was about as good at following orders as Quill. “Don't wantchu fallin' out an' gettin' underfoot, is all.”

It raised its little chin with something Yondu construed as defiance, and began its demented thrash for escape once more.

A small silver blaze differentiated it from the others, glinting from the center of its snubby black snout. Why, if you tilted your head and let your vision drift half-focused, it almost looked like an arrow. Like, a small arrow. A crappy one.

"Or a peashooter," Yondu mused aloud.

Kraglin, meanwhile, gave him that squinty look that meant he suspected he'd lost his mind. “Y'do realize yer talkin' to them?”

“So?”

“They're animals? Like, dumb animals?”

“Talk to you, don't I?”

Snappy comeback though it might have been, it wasn't worth the sulk that followed. Kraglin didn't say another word until they were back at camp. Luckily, Yondu was too busy sniggering at his own hilarity to notice.

The cave mouth was pustulated as a hooker's on Knowhere. Kraglin broke his self-imposed vow of silence as he folded their sleeping mats, compressing the air from the thermoregulation blankets in sharp bubblewrap pops. “I don't crack jokes about you bein' a slave.”

Somebody was feeling tetchy _._

Hraxians got like that though, over the whole _animal_ thing. Came from being classified as mid-sapient lifeforms, back when the Xandarians rumbled down from the skies in their swanky silver spacecraft and realized that the first beneficiaries of their quadrant-wide colonisation spree had yet to discover the basics of steam locomotion, let alone cross-stellar travel.

Course, that was centuries back. In Yondu's opinion, it was high time Kraglin got over it.

Yondu hefted the bucket, nudging the silver-nosed critter off the lip. It waggled its arm nubs at him in stubby reproach. “Whatever. We're done here. Time to head.”

They'd hidden their ship at the rear of the cave, where the rocks converged in quivery, needle-thin formations: whitesalt stalactites and columns bobbled like cooling lava. The moisture was inescapable. The cave floor had a shallow gradient, and rainwater blew in through the mouth, then trundled downhill to splash around their landing gear.

The _Warbird_ didn't mind. She'd survived a lot, this old girl – almost as much as the two of them.

Yondu tucked a bed roll under each arm, squatted, and took the pail with him when he stood. He waddled to the landing ramp. He only lost three tadpoles on the way.

Yondu jerked his chin at the stragglers. “Go get 'em, would ya?”

Kraglin reared back. “I ain't touchin' 'em!”

“So get some tongs, ya limp-dick shit. See if ya can find yer balls along the way.”

Kraglin grumbled, swore, scratched at his gnat bites, and did as he was told.

They blasted from the cave before sundown. Couldn't hit full-burn; didn't want to avalanche the whole mountain. But Yondu eased the throttle forwards a touch further than necessary, so scythes from their jets scorched the rocks.

There. Stakar wanted him to reconnect with his roots, leave his mark on the world that forsook him? Yondu'd left his mark on Alpha Centauri-IV, alright – an ugly streak of charcoal and the litter from a half-dozen Beastie packs, each of which would take a thousand years to biodegrade.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Obligatory note that I don't condone Yondu's 'get over it' attitude; he's just an asshat who's been through his own shit.**


	2. Oh No A Sex

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> **Rating has gone up for a reason... ;)**

They had a long journey ahead. Knowhere was, after all, a galaxy and a half away. Still, it shouldn’t take more than three days.

Wormhole-A933 would barf them out a hundred lightyears rimwards from their destination. They could switch to the regular jump network from there.

Some jackass had drunkenly named Wormhole-A933 'the Hraxian Anus', in honor of the hairlike filaments of space-time that billowed around it, as if being blown by solar flatulence. But while the name stuck – no man would want to stick their todger in it, and it shat out enough filth to qualify – _certain crewmembers_ found it offensive. As Yondu always strived to be the embodiment of political correctness, 'Wormhole-A933' it was.

When he spoke out loud.

Anyway, to reach the Hraxian Anus, you had to cross the Nova no-fly zone. That was a tract of uncharted space, brimming with sensors that reported any thruster heat signatures that passed through.

The idea was noble enough: to protect the primitive natives of the Silver Spiral galaxy from undue contact. Fat lot of good it did the Centaurians, during the Kree-Xandarian war.

If the Kree got away with trafficking, Yondu figured, stroking Peashooter's snout, why shouldn't he? Only fair that, what with him being a victim of so many heinous Crimes Against Sapient Species.

Kraglin assumed command of the joystick as they came up on the dead zone. This joystick sat on his side of the cockpit, differentiated from Yondu’s by the complete lack of baubles, toys, and discarded items of clothing from the romp-before-last.

Kraglin glanced to his right and groaned. It was the sort of groan that demanded an answer, but Yondu left him hanging a minute anyway, scratching under Peashooter's squidgy chin, before he asked: “What’s bitin' you, Kraggles? Any skeeters get aboard?”

“Yer holding them like you hold yer Beasties.” Kraglin nodded to the pail, propped between Yondu's knees. “Don't wanna hear crunchin', is all. Them’s cargo, not lunch.”

Peashooter turned into the caress of Yondu's black-painted nails. Demanding brat. Still, he was more affectionate than the last one Yondu had on his lap, who'd screeched up a storm when Yondu wrenched his head to one side so Kraglin could inject the translator capsule into his ear.

Yondu grinned at the memory. Now they weren't on some galaxy-saving venture, he didn't have much of an excuse to hang out with Quill. While Yondu needed that excuse – relied on it; contrived it even; pinging the newly-repaired _Benetar_ under the false pretence of misfiring comms relays – Quill had no problem visiting the _Quadrant_ whenever he fancied _._

 _Checking to make sure you idiots ain’t croaked._ That was his usual reasoning. Generally speaking, he showed up once a month, mooched from their pantry and fuel stock, let Groot steal all Yondu’s candy, then swooped away again.

Once, Yondu asked if he'd stay a little longer, help them patch the fire damage from Ego's explosion. _Ordered_ , more like.

Quill got shirky and missed the next rendezvous, so Yondu didn't ask again.

Back in the present, he patted his pail. No sense thinking about all that now. He unrolled his beastie packet from his pocket and snapped one in half, offering the smaller end to Peashooter.

“Oi, Krags. We comin' in hot?”

Kraglin nodded. Their thrusters gushed on full; should be enough momentum to carry them through the monitored stretch and out the other side.

Of course, navigating the dead zone was always an exercise in luck. One miscalculation? Or worse – one asteroid, flung out from a neighboring belt? If it clipped your tail gear and knocked you off course you'd be stuck there, in the orbit of a star, until you snapped on your thrusters or starved.

Weren't going to happen, of course. If a planet-sized god had failed to kill them, Yondu would like to see the dead zone try.

“Switch drives,” he told Kraglin. “Engines off, auxiliary only.”

“I know how to fly through the stars-damned dead zone, sir.”

“Get on with it, then.”

Kraglin rolled his eyes, and did so.

They coasted along, sailing towards the first star _en route_. No need for them to hang about in the cockpit – autopilot could take care of the rest.

Yondu plonked Peashooter in his bucket and the bucket on his seat, winding the straps criss-cross around it. That task taken care of, he stood, stretched, and ambled for their cabin.

“You gonna stay there all cycle?" he called. When Kraglin failed to sprint for the ladder shaft, Yondu draped himself artfully over the wall above the trapdoor. “We got a half-day cycle where our hands ain’t needed on joysticks. Wanna put ‘em to better use?”

Kraglin checked the cockpit chronometer. “I dunno. Only got an hour before my exeskelesuit needs a recharge.”

“Yeah, yeah. I'll be gentle.”

“You better, sir. Last time ya sat on my lap -”

“Broke both yer thighbones, I know. Won't let me forget it, will ya? Damn low-gravver.”

Kraglin sighed, but didn't sound especially put-off by the memory. He creaked out of his chair – so light the suspension hydraulics barely registered the difference – and loped towards him.

The nearest star blazed on. Closer, brighter, hotter. A beacon that swallowed their screens.

There would come a point – an event horizon, of sorts – where if their doddery old AIs had slipped a decimal point they'd go careering directly into the fireball, combusting in a great whuff of flame. If that happened, Yondu'd rather go out with a cock down his throat and a whiskery mouth on his naughty bits.

Without further ado, he hustled Kraglin ahead of him, and – with a last glance at Peashooter, risen from the depths to peek over the bucket side – he climbed down the cockpit ladder and shut the trapdoor.

* * *

Nothing made Kraglin more forgiving than a squeeze of his dick. He didn't much care what did the squeezing, so long as it was warm, preferably sloppy, and tight enough to lock onto his knot.

No wonder he liked the M-ships so much. Their exhaust ports made decent substitutes, when cap'n weren't in fucking distance.

Suffice to say, by the time Yondu guided the head of Kraglin’s cock between his teeth, his earlier mention of ' _animal'_ had been well and truly forgotten.

Kraglin knelt over him while Yondu lay flat on his back. Kraglin had been stripped from his leathery shell. His bugbites stood out angry red, but it couldn't be worse than the ingrown hairs he suffered after the one and only time he shaved.

Yondu convinced him to quit glancing at his chronometer by promising to lay still, look pretty, and let Kraglin do the legwork. Even if Kraglin's exeskelesuit went into recharge mode mid-bout, they wouldn't need to worry about Yondu rolling on top and smushing him.

While Yondu's word didn't mean squat, he did keep it occasionally. Especially when Kraglin's brittle bones were at stake.

They needn't have worried. Kraglin's suit behaved itself.

Static glittered at every point of contact, prickling Yondu's fingertips and the wide-stretched ring of his lips. Meant that when Kraglin canted against him, knot squidging on Yondu's chin, he _felt_ it.

Yondu hummed, happily. He sent one hand on an exploratory foray between Kraglin’s asscheeks. He mapped the hairy ravine, warm and sweaty as the jungle they'd just left.

Springy curls caught on his nails. When Yondu located his hole, buried deep within the thicket, he circled it once – smirking in the privacy of his head, at the thought of a certain wormhole – before introducing his finger to the point where the creases converged.

The tip of his pointed nail dipped in. Just shallow enough to tickle.

Kraglin panted. It registered cold on the spit-slicked flesh around Yondu’s bits, making him twitch.

It was all very delicious. The noises, the hungry little wriggles, the plump of Kraglin's knot against Yondu’s stubble. Yondu hated to ruin the mood, but he didn't want to get the guy’s hopes up.

He dragged himself off his dick long enough to murmur: “Don’t got no strap-on today.”

“S-s’okay,” Kraglin managed. He rutted off Yondu’s finger entirely in an effort to squash more cock into his face. “Rather f-fuck ya anyway. Wanna have y’all squirmy an’ clingin’ to me an’ wailin’ my name, an' -”

Yondu did not _wail_ Kraglin’s name _._ Yondu _grunted_. Y’know. In a manly fashion.

Still, this sounded promising.

“Best quit with the yack and get to the lickin' then, boy,” he said.

From the demanding jab of the cock against his teeth, Kraglin wanted much the same.

Yondu indulged him. He swallowed Kraglin’s cockhead and kept on going, all the way down, until he could dig his tongue into the groove of his knot.

Knot-sweat was an acquired taste, but Yondu guessed he must’ve acquired it, because the pulse against his tongue beat as frenzied as his own. After a moment of contemplation and an internal shrug, he opened his mouth wider and eased forwards again.

Kraglin surrounded him. Smell, taste; trembling thighs. The closer Yondu got to his groin, the more the stretch in his jaw intensified, pressure building on the back of his throat.

Yondu didn't have a gag reflex, not anymore. But he still choked, just a little, when Kraglin gasped, hips jerking helplessly forwards, snaring Yondu’s mouth around the broadest ride of his knot...

A push, a growl. In it popped.

Yondu gulped, jaw already cramping from the stretch. The knot settled, trapped behind his teeth. He stirred Kraglin's pubes with each push and suck of his breath.

“Fuck,” Kraglin whispered, over and over again. “Fuck, _fuck_. Boss – _boss…”_

Looked like Yondu weren't getting buggered after all. That knot wouldn't slide out in a hurry, and Kraglin couldn’t get it up twice in one day anymore.

Still, at least the Hraxian didn’t faff about with his business. He set to a steady rhythm, hips rocking, pulling and shunting the tender globes of his knot against the backs of Yondu's incisors. When he came (a long shudder, a sweet breath shaped like _captain_ ) everything poured straight down Yondu’s throat.

Yondu’s reflexive swallows milked out more and more. Hraxian spunk tended towards the runny and plentiful. It filled him up, Kraglin's bollocks sagging past his beard as they drained.

You had time to think, during a Hraxian orgasm. Yondu's brain revolved mostly around how much he preferred taking it up his other end. At least that way it dribbled straight back out again, and he could squeeze out the dregs during his next potty visit.

He swallowed, pulling on the limpening shaft. The knot crushed the roof of his mouth, his tongue squashed against its underside.

Must be sensitive. Kraglin spat a vituperative selection of Xandarian, Hrax-cant and Common. “You bastard, you fuckin’ –“

Yondu didn’t mean to gulp the first time, but the second, it was with the full intent of testing Kraglin’s vocabulary. Kraglin cussed in every language he knew and a few he didn't. His nonsense garble babbled into Yondu’s cochlear translator and out the other side.

Yondu opened his eyes, long enough to ensure it was Kraglin's brain that had shorted, not his exeskelesuit. Then he sent Kraglin – back curved just enough to see what Yondu was up to – a wink.

Only problem was, when Kraglin was wronged, he didn’t just sit back and take it. He _retaliated._

Took him a minute of red-faced stuttering to recover. Then he went on the offensive, shoving Yondu’s thighs open and burying his face between them.

His cock yanked Yondu’s teeth, but Yondu couldn't work his jaws wide enough to release it. Served Kraglin right if it hurt.

Kraglin, to his credit, didn’t bitch. “Lessee how you like it, huh?” he asked.

Then he dived in.

Yondu shuddered as Kraglin licked him, rolling his tongue slow over the shallow wrinkled folds. He fucked him on the tip of it, shallow and fast, never lingering long enough for Yondu to focus. The sensations fizzled through him, glittering from Yondu's pointed ears to his curling toes.

Aw, _hell yes._

He wouldn't last long. He narrowly avoided chomping down on Kraglin’s dick, when a delicate trace of the bastard's tongue left him squirming across their discarded leathers.

Either Kraglin was oblivious to the danger to his party piece, or he figured it worth the risk. He pinned Yondu’s legs apart, a hand clamped to each blue knee. The exeskelesuit crackled, augmenting Kraglin’s weedy arm strength. He kneaded Yondu's thighs and gave his mound a sloppy kiss, and finally – finally! – pressed his tongue in as deep as it would go.

Yondu's back made a concerning snap. He arched high enough to bang his implant on the cabin floor (they'd aimed for the bunks, and fallen a meter short).

Kraglin yelped at the yank on his netherbits. Really, he should’ve considered that _before_ giving Yondu mindblowing, starry-eyed oral while his knot was jammed tonsil-tickling deep in his gob.

Still, he refused to be dissuaded. He licked into Yondu, again and again and again, until Yondu resonated to that slippery pulse. His jaw popped around a soundless holler, Kraglin’s knot on the cusp of freedom.

The pressure grew, and grew, and _grew._ Even so, his orgasm snuck up on him, striking in a burst of pleasure that ran from him in a quivering gush.

Yondu slithered off Kraglin’s deflating knot. He made a noise that sounded perilously close to a whine.

No reprieve; Kraglin fastened on and _sucked,_ gulping him down like Yondu had drunk him. Yondu rippled inside, waves bursting against the inside of his pouch. He let his eyes roll back, into the dark comfort of his head.

When they returned, he found Kraglin hovering over him, limp dick slapping his cheek. Jizzy spit webbed his lips to Yondu’s hole.

“Fuck,” he breathed.

“Fuck,” agreed Kraglin. He licked his soaked mouth. “Look at’chu, boss. All loose an’ wet for me. Think I might actually be able to…”

The finger made Yondu jerk. It traced his tiny slit, back and forth, massaging him at his tenderest.

Yondu tensed up. Then tensed up _more,_ when that finger slipped through the pinch. “Krags-!”

He weren’t _designed_ for this sort of thing. He might not have a prick, but he certainly didn’t have a pussy – not like 90% of the galaxy who reproduced via sexual means, rather than letting out spores and whatnot. If Kraglin wanted to stick his dick in something, his choices ran between Yondu’s ass and his mouth, and if Kraglin wanted a dick in _him_ , Yondu’s arrow harness plus a plastic model made for an adequate stand-in.

 _This_ part of him? Whatever had gone wrong with it, it’d left him with a hole too tight to be of any use. Its only function was to spray out jizz like a teaspoon had been stuck under a tap.

Some birth defect, most likely. But thinking up reasons why his Mama might’ve sold him weren’t conducive to good bedroom atmosphere.

Kraglin paused, questioning. Most of that sprayed jizz currently clung to his beard. “Sir, you good?”

Yondu shuffled onto his elbows. “Course I ain’t, you just shoved your damn finger…”

Wait. Kraglin _did_ just shove his damn finger where it didn’t belong. But somehow, impossibly… It _didn’t hurt._

_It._

_Didn’t._

_Hurt._

While Yondu processed that, Kraglin chewed his lip. Then slowly, very slowly, he pushed his finger forwards, and pulled it out again.

Yondu grimaced. That stung. But it was a good sting, a warm sting. Not like it stretched his internal bits beyond what they were ever meant to take.

They'd tried this before, course they had. But Yondu'd never managed more than one, and he'd always called these games off short, out of fear the ache between his legs wouldn't alleviate in time for him to stomp up on Bridge in the morning and bawl his crew into compliance.

Now there weren’t no Bridge and there weren’t no crew. Just him and Kraglin and a bucket of polliwogs.

They had time. Time to explore each other, learn their limits.

From the hunger on Kraglin’s face, those horizons had just broadened.

“Think I could fit my cock in here?” he whispered, teasing another finger around Yondu’s rim. “Y'know. Eventually. Not the knotty bit, but like. The tip?”

 _Hell._ If the idea of it didn't make him throb…

“Jus’ gotta work ya open first, sir,” continued Kraglin. His breath was almost as hot as his gaze, breaking in gusts over Yondu’s scarred thigh. Yondu’s cum dried slow in his beard. “Real slow an’ soft an’ all.”

Yondu’s gonads were tucked at the top of his channel, beyond the reach of Kraglin’s finger. They didn't have anything more to give. But they clenched up anyway, just from hearing that.

He jellified as Kraglin licked around his fingers, plucking the stretched skin, easing the second one _just_ inside…

“Could get’chu plugs,” Kraglin mused. His voice had dropped to that scratchy octave he liked to use before he killed people. “You like that, sir? One in the front, one in the back? Fuck. Could make ya walk around with ‘em in ya all day, then drag ya to our cabin, bend ya over yer desk, take my pick of yer holes…”

“Stop,” Yondu gasped, flattening his palms on the floor to stop himself shoving Kraglin away. Didn’t know if the skinny git's exeskelesuit could take it. “Stop, stop, _stop._ ”

Kraglin frowned. He knelt up, peering under his belly to where his Captain lay, prone on the deck.

Yondu curled, fin bumping Kraglin’s thighs. He screwed the heels of his hands into his eyes, spit glossing his chin.

“Sir?”

“Y-you say any more I’m g-gonna...”

“What, sir?”

Yondu couldn’t – wouldn’t – answer.

Kraglin frowned. He squeezed those penetrating fingertips together, starting a cautious outdraw.

He went slow. It didn’t matter.

Yondu _whined_. His groin tingled, soaked with saliva and slick and a helluva lot of cum. The retracting twist of Kraglin’s hand catapulted him through the danger zone and out the other side.

His spine locked in a high curve. His innards clenched, abdomen bearing down, and a tiny splatter followed Kraglin’s digits, pushed out by the flex of his shivering hole.

It was smaller than before. Thinner too. More like a sneeze than a full-on squirt.

Pretty fucking unmistakable nevertheless, and Yondu twisted to one side, burrowing into their piled uniforms until the stench of leather smothered him, navy to the points of his ears.

Kraglin stared at it. Kraglin stared at him, as he struggled to keep his eyes open and swallow his drool and remember how to shut his mouth all at once.

“Damn, that was fun,” he said.

Which, of course, was when the meteorite bounced off their wing.

* * *

Yondu burped. He tasted jizz. He gulped it back down, scrunching his nose.

“This's your fault, y'know.”

Kraglin snorted. He struck a sullen picture: pout lost to his overbite, arms crossed like a pair of sticks. “Oh yeah? Wanna tell me how that is, sir?”

“If ya hadn't distracted me, I'dda noticed the proximity alarms.”

“ _I_ distracted _you?_ ”

“You was lickin' my bits!”

“You was deep-throatin' mine!”

Yondu held up his hands. “Look,” he said, striving for calm and falling several miles short. “Les' not talk about this in front of Peashooter, 'kay?”

“Pea – what now?” Kraglin boggled between Yondu and the tadpole, who was miserably slopping around in the remains of his water supply. “You _named it?_ ”

“Him,” Yondu corrected. Kraglin shook his head.

“Oh no.”

“No what?”

“No, I've seen this before.”

“You've seen what before?”

“This!” Outflung hands, bared teeth. The glow of the approaching gas giant rebounded waxily off Kraglin's lead incisors. “You ain’t lookin’ at him like you look at your beasties. You’re gettin' all -”

Yondu didn't like where this was going. “Don't you say it, boy.”

“Soft! It's just like with Quill! I ain't havin' it again sir, an' – an' you wanna know why?”

Yondu brought his fist down on the back of the chair, hard enough to splash a little of the remaining water out of the bucket. In the bottom, Peashooter and his siblings squelched in their own juice, opening and closing their little mouths, skin turning leathery from exposure to the arid shipside air.

Yondu knew the feeling. The moist rainforest atmosphere had spoiled him; now everything itched, from the dried cum on his thighs – _Warbird's_ shower system broke a year back; at the time he had neither money nor will to fix it, and while Stakar had provided the former, the latter had yet to manifest – to the unpleasant peeling sensation from where his forehead baked under the harsh solar lights.

“Go on!” he roared. He blasted Kraglin back a step with the sheer volume of noise, spittle and halitosis. “Say it! _Say it makes me weak_!”

Kraglin's fury, which rose to meet his like two stars flaring up in preparation to consume one another, abruptly deflated.

“Um,” he said. “What now?”

“Say it makes me _weak_! Say that every _flarkin'_ time I let myself _give a shit,_ I fuck it up. Like with Stakar. Like with Quill. An’ with you too – cause it's a fuckin' _gift_ or somethin' to destroy _everythin'_ I fuckin' _touch -_ ”

Kraglin’s fuzzy eyebrows met at the center of his forehead. “Sir, I was gonna say that we've gotta get rid of them, ‘cause that meteorite altered our trajectory. We need to fire thrusters to get out of this system without being sucked into a gas giant. And _that'll_ alert the Nova Corps, so we can expect a stop'n'search. Which means we gotta eject them from the airlock _now_ , else we'll be done for poaching rare species and animal traffickin', an' I for one _really_ don't wanna go back to the Kyln.”

Yondu wrangled his mouth shut. That was harder than it should be. His jaw still burned; fuck Kraglin and fuck his big red knot.

“Ah,” he said, after a moment’s pause. “That. Well, of course. Why didn't you say so?” He returned to the bucket, and the sweating, slow-roasting pile of tadpoles within. “Uh. For the record, this ain't how I wanted to end it. But...”

“Better a quick death out there than a slow one under these lights,” said Kraglin. Even sounded like he was trying to be comforting about it, rather than hurrying him along. He patted Yondu on the back and ushered him out.

The pail was considerably lighter than it used to be. Most of the water slopped out when the meteorite hit. Their rationing cycle was a closed system, carefully calibrated to avoid unnecessary expense. If he refilled the bucket, they might not last the journey back to Andromeda.

It wasn’t worth the risk.

It definitely wasn’t worth the risk of pissing off the Nova Corps. Not after they'd been nice enough to expunge their outstanding warrants after Yondu and his men saved their homeworld.

Kraglin unhinged the airlock and headed back up the ladder, pushing a wayfaring trinket back onto Yondu’s half of the cockpit before he activated the manual steering console. “Just yell when you've dumped them, so I can blast us away from here. Make it quick, yeah sir? Ain’t got long before we hit orbit for the gas giant.”

Yondu placed the pail between his boots. He looked down his nose at them: the poor, suffering critters he'd scooped out of their home.

Lil' abductees. Reminded him almost of another bunch of kids, several decades back.

Now, as then, he'd never had especially good intentions for them. They were due a life swimming about in a tank, for the Collector to wheel out and parade before any guests esteemed enough to be treated to his full freakshow.

Was that a better fate than being murdered by a planet-sized god? Or, for that matter, being exposed to the cold grasp of the vacuum?

Which would they choose, if they were capable of making choices? Enslavement to a mad Elder, or death?

At the very least, they weren't sapient. Not smart enough to foresee the consequences.

Yondu hadn't had that luxury, first time he was told a prospective master was interested in buying him from the war pits for personal service. Back then he turned a stolen scalpel-sharp Kree blade between his hands every night and thought about how easy – how marvellously, deceptively _easy_ it would be.

 _Just_ _one little cut._

Stakar liked to claim Yondu didn't know what a choice was until the shackles fell from his wrists, the hobbles from his ankles, the collar from his neck. Bullshit. Yondu always had one choice: whether to keep surviving or give up.

He always picked _survive._ No matter how tempting the other option got.

“Sorry, kids,” he said, upending the bucket in the airlock. The polliwogs slid over the grilled floor. Yondu poked the nearest back over the seal, shaking the bucket over them to let the last of their water rain down. “I ain't done right by ya. Ain't fair, but thas the way of the galaxy. Don't take it personal now.”  


“Are they gone yet?” hollered Kraglin from the front. Yondu shot a flipped bird behind him, knowing full well Kraglin wouldn't see it.

“Give us a stars-damned minute!”

“Better be a fast fuckin' minute, sir! Ya realize we're headed straight for a huge fuckin' gas giant -”

Yondu tuned him out. That was the best thing about having been in a relationship for near-on thirty years; you got good at ignoring each other.

He issued the polliwogs a pair of chest thumps, quiet so Kraglin wouldn't hear, and stepped out of the compartment, letting the door creak shut between them. The filtration systems rumbled gently overhead. They pulled a portion of the air out the airlock whenever it shut, so that they didn't lose too much with every ex-vent.

Yondu sighed. He smacked the button. He turned away fast enough that he didn't have to watch space's maw crank open and the little beasts tumble out, somersaulting head over tail, lidless eyes glazing with frost.

Poor bastards. Never stood a chance.

“Chirrup?”

Yondu froze.

Peashooter sat in the shadow of his upraised boot. He cocked his spongey black head, moisture evaporating from his gills.

“Chirrup?” he said again, and nudged Yondu's heel.

Yondu contemplated putting it down. He imagined grinding there, crushing that squidgy shell of a skull.

It would be far too much hassle, scrubbing the blood from his boot.

“We good sir?” Kraglin called, panic threading his voice as the gas giant bloomed on their screens, sensors screaming about gravity wells and spheres of influence and _the point of no return._

Yondu looked at Peashooter.

Peashooter looked at him.

“We good,” he agreed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Hope you enjoyed! Please drop comments and kudos if so <3**


	3. Chapter 3

“So,” said Nova-girl slowly. “You just _happened_ to be taking a – what did you say it was again?”

“Honeymoon,” Yondu repeated, while Kraglin choked quietly behind him.

“Honeymoon. In the Silver Spiral galaxy. And your nav equipment _happened_ to go offline as you headed towards the dead zone.”

Yondu placed his hand on his belly. Casually. He’d claim indigestion, if Kraglin asked.

“Awful luck,” he said, shaking his head. “I know this don’t look good, but I’m sure a fine, upstandin’ young Nova official like yerself ain’t gonna fall back on old anti-Ravager prej-oo-dishes.”

The light glanced off his prosthetic, only to fall upon the arrow by his hip. The chick’s eyes followed a similar route. They lingered a moment, widening most satisfyingly when Yondu adjusted his weight, leaning on the opposite leg to show off the shaft.

Still, she wasted no time in getting back to business. Tough bird, this. “And you just _happened_ to wind up on the other side of a gas giant before you got your malfunctioning systems back online?”

Yondu made to clap her on the shoulder. He turned the gesture into open, upheld hands when she levelled her plasma pistol at his heart.

“Woah, there! Was jus’ gonna say that it seems you get the gist, so if ya wouldn’t mind awful much, me an’ my man here better be on our way.” He leaned conspiratorially close, enough to give her a good whiff of what happened when you spent thirty years on the outskirts of the outlaw community with no access to basic dental care. “Y’know. Lotsa honeymoonin’ to do, an’ all.”

Her plasma pistol banged his sternum. Luckily, for a patroller stuck out at the ass-end of nowhere, this chick was spiffy with her maintenance. No residue ate through his leathers and into the flesh beneath.

The scent of past battles clung to it though: scorched hair, blood, necrosified skin. Clean it might be, but that didn’t make it unused.

The girl’s mouth thinned into a line. Her finger caressed the edge of the trigger guard, and –

“Alright.” Yondu stepped back, palms still raised. “I know this drill. You gotta check our stock, make sure we don’t got no Terrans in deep storage.”

The woman’s lips twitched down. Yondu couldn’t help focusing on them; they were the only part of her he could see, under the blank reflective curve of her visor. “I hear you have experience in that area.”

“Aw!” Yondu cracked a grin of a breadth, yellowness, and general pungency that could only be described as ‘cheesy’. “She knows me! C’mon, girlie. They still tell the tale of how me and my boys saved yer planet from that Ronan freak?”

The girl snorted. “Don’t take credit you don’t deserve. The Guardians saved my planet, and more Nova men died than Ravagers that day.”

“Whassat say about the Nova,” Kraglin muttered, but he shut up when Yondu kicked him.

He soon regretted it. The sharp movement made Peashooter thrash _._

Yondu had stowed things in his pouch before. Course he had; you didn’t discover that your torso had a handy pocket without putting it to use, especially in the smuggling industry. But no matter what found its way in there, dried gummy smoke-root or capped syringes or snacks, all of it had been inanimate.

As for Peashooter? Peashooter _squirmed._

Kraglin stopped pulling pathetic expressions. “Sir?”

Yondu concentrated on keeping a straight face. “Musta pulled somethin’. Honeymoons; y’know how it is.”

Nova-girl – Corpsman Vileska, claimed the name strip on her jacket breast – frowned. “What’s that?” she enquired, pointing to the bucket beside Yondu’s feet.

“Honeymoons,” Kraglin echoed, maintaining his pokerface. “Y’know how it is.”

Yondu kicked him again. Peashooter bonked off his liver, but hell, it was worth it.

Vileska’s mouth pulled impossibly thinner. Keeping the pistol up, tickling Yondu’s ribs every time he breathed, she detached a vacsuit nodule from her utility belt. She slapped it on her chest, the forcefield swarming out to gobble her, flashing over her bare hands in a tessellating holomatter matrix. Yondu nodded to it.

“Honey, we ain’t near an airlock. You plannin’ on scupperin’ us?”

One blast to the windscreen would do it. He kept his voice light and mirthful, but in the depths of his memory he sunk once more into that bacta tank, warm, chemical goop closing over his head, nanites nibbling the frostbitten skin from his fingers and nose.

He’d been dead, technically, for a minute or thereabouts, before Rocket applied a generous dose of electricity and Kraglin gave him vehement mouth to mouth, effectively reminding him of what he’d be missing out on if he slid over that edge into oblivion. And Quill held his damn hand and called him ‘dad’, of course. There was that too.

Anyway, the point _was,_ one trip outside without a vacsuit had been more than enough.

Vileska shook her head. “Protection,” she gritted, returning her blaster to its holster. “From whatever foul molds might be growing in your pockets.”

“Ooh, we gettin’ the full fondlin’ experience? Darlin’, I usually make ‘em buy me a drink first…”

If Vileska’s lips pinched any tighter, her head would collapse on itself and form a singularity. “You think I haven’t heard that one before? Honestly. You and your scum friends need to work on some new material.”

Yondu popped the buckle pinning his coat closed across his chest. This chick had spunk. The Nova needed more like her, rather than wet-nosed kids who would throw away their lives in some grand gesture of sacrifice, interlocking to form a net that spanned Xandar’s cobalt sky.

“It ain’t like we send out a newsletter." Better to say that, than that his scum friends had only recently decided they were talking to him again.

Vileska began her frisk: quick and professional. She dipped into each of his pockets, running dainty amber fingers along the seams, sweeping the stitched overlap between each shells of leather.

Yondu didn’t hold his breath as she pressed lightly across his stomach and chest – too obvious; couldn’t tip her off. Thankfully, Peashooter had completed his wriggling. Having made himself comfortable, he subsided to the base of Yondu’s pouch: a warm, wet, and disturbingly liquid weight.

Little bastard better not be pissing. He’d be out the airlock after the others, to hell with the Collector’s bounty.

“Still,” Yondu continued, chipper as ever. “I'll pass the message around. New quips to use on Nova Corpsmen. Uh – might wanna be careful. He’s low-gravver; his suit’s in recharge.” This as Vileska finished his inspection and moved onto his mate.

Kraglin didn’t like being touched by anyone he hadn’t served, fought, and fucked beside for a decade. He didn’t make it easy on Vileska, sneering coldly down at her and standing tall so she had to teeter on tiptoes as she smoothed – ever so gently – across his fragile chest.

Yondu tutted his tongue off his teeth. “C’mon now, Obfonteri. Be nice to our lil’ friend. She don’t want to be gropin’ ya either.”

Kraglin slouched to give Vileska access to his jumpsuit collar, but he didn’t look happy about it.

Vileska sent her hand on a bold expedition into Kraglin’s thigh pockets. She drew out two dinky blades. They had accrued the fond nicknames ‘fuck and ‘ow' from Yondu, who invariably discovered them whenever he sat on Kraglin’s lap. To be fair though, considering the sharpness of Kraglin’s pelvis, it wasn’t always easy to tell whether what was stabbing him in the backside was metal or bone.

Vileska tossed the knives over her shoulder. Kraglin made a grunt of protest, but couldn’t exactly start throttling her when he was more likely to break his own fingers than her airways.

Yondu touched his stomach again. Once he came clean about the little critter snoozing besides his small intestine, Kraglin would most likely retrieve those blades for the sole purpose of brandishing them at him, while vocally telling him how much of an idiot he’d been.

On cue, a jolt seared through Yondu’s belly. Damn. Don’t tell him the little shit had grown teeth.

Vileska busied herself with the remaining contents of Kraglin’s pocket. She didn’t spare her other prisoner a glance. Which was stupid, because Yondu could’ve ganked her in thirty-three different, inventive, and some would even say _artistic_ ways by now, not least of which being to whistle his arrow through her head from behind.

But you didn’t rotate out for poacher duty for a Standard unless you were a) a loner, and b) a ballsy sonnuvabitch. Vileska broadcast no fear. She must’ve realized that if Yondu wanted her dead, he would’ve done it by now.

Pain blazed again, stabbing back towards his stomach lining. Something felt _wrong_ in there. Too hot, too sticky. And that ache, like…

Like Peashooter had acquired a taste for Centaurian.

Blood drained from Yondu’s face, leaving his cheeks waxy. “I gotta go bathroom,” he said.

Vileska snorted. “You’re not going anywhere. Not until I’ve searched your hold.”

Yondu’s heavy breathing did nothing to lessen the sting. It ate into him, acidic in intensity. “Yeah well,” he managed, looking resolutely at her and only at her in the hopes it would stop his vision spinning. “Can’t say no to nature’s call.”

“You can hold it.” Despite the callous words, Cassandre’s chin formed a groove down its center. She sucked on her front teeth. “Are you sick?”

“Ate something bad,” Yondu gasped, catching Kraglin’s confused gaze.

 _Is this a trick?_ he seemed to be asking. _Is this where I gut her?_

Steel glinted. A third knife, shaken loose from Kraglin’s sleeve to land hilt-first in his palm.

Yondu imperceptibly shook his head. The knife retreated, but the agony didn’t. “I, uh, got the squits.”

Vileska delved back into Kralin’s pockets. “Well, your pants have my sympathies. Stay right where you are, Udonta.”

Stars. Something was chewing through his pouch wall, into the warm blue squish beneath.

Yondu propped a hand on the wall to steady himself. He panted in shoulder-heaving gusts, no longer caring if Vileska and Kraglin saw. There was nothing but the ache inside him, blistering and caustic, the horrible sense that he was _dissolving from within…_

“Sir?” Kraglin stepped forwards, ignoring the jab of the pistol against his belly. “Sir, you hurt?” The tone added on _without telling me, again_ so eloquently that he didn’t need to put it into words. He spun on Vileska, nose creased from the breadth of his guttural snarl. “The _hell_ did you do to him?”

“Do? Me?” Vileska’s scowl puckered her cheeks like someone had stitched them together. “If this is some act to distract me –“

“It ain’t no act!” snapped Kraglin. “Look at him!”

He took another step. Vileska drew her plasma pistol – a warning, a threat.

Yondu was, by this point, bent double. Still, he flung out a hand. _Stop._ No sense the both of them dying.

Vileska kept her pistol trained on Kraglin. “Stay here,” she barked. “I’ll scout your rooms. If you’ve left this cockpit by the time I come back, I exercise my Nova-sanctioned abilities to shoot to kill.”

“Nice girl, ain’t she,” sputtered Yondu as she descended down the ladder, swivelling her blaster between them until the last minute: a periscope that glowed plasma-green. “No-nonsense, an’ all. Kinda hot, if ya ask me.”

Kraglin didn’t rise to the bait. He stumbled to Yondu, knees thunking the ground. “Don’t land on me,” he said stupidly, hands wringing an inch from Yondu’s back. “My suit’s off.”

Yondu folded. First at the ankle, then at the knee, then at the waist and the neck as well. Eyes scrunched shut. Heart a muted roar. Light flashed in the darkness, relentless as the lighthouse beacons dropped at the edge of quantum asteroid fields.

Something was wrong. Something was seriously, badly, _awfully_ wrong.

Not even a year since they fished him out of deepspace, and Yondu was dying _again._

“Yondu.” Thin hands gripped his shoulders, gingerly nudging him to roll. Without his suit, Kraglin had the muscle strength of a toddler, but he was insistent. Yondu let their weak artificial gravity do the work, slumping heavily on his side. “Yondu, cap’n. Talk to me. Whas wrong, what happened? The hell did she do?”

“Not her,” Yondu croaked. This was ridiculous. He’d saved the galaxy, what – twice now? Surely he deserved to go out in a stupendous firework burst, sticking both middle fingers up at Stakar? Not in a shivering coil, arms wrapped around his spasming stomach as his latest pet digested him. No Quill by his side.

Still, in Quill's absence, Kraglin would have to suffice.

Yondu drew his last shaky breath. He clasped the hand that brushed his knuckles, loose enough not to snap Kraglin’s bones. He shut his eyes, waited for the inevitable, and hoped that death came fast.

Kraglin disagreed.

“The hell’re you doin’? Don’t jus’ – don’t you fall asleep on me, dammit!”

He sounded bewildered. A small part of him must expect Yondu to bounce up, reveal that this was all a trick at Vileska’s expense. Now they’d scooted her from the cockpit, they could whiz back into the forbidden zone, nab the tadpoles’ corpses, and see how much the Collector was willing to fork out on zootomy specimens, pre-freeze-dried.

But there weren’t no plan. There weren’t nothing but _pain_ – which admittedly didn’t stab quite as sadistically as before. Yondu suspected that was because his nerve endings had liquefied.

“Hurts,” he growled, disengaging from Kraglin’s hand so he could form a tight fist without crushing anything. “Fuckin’ _hurts._ ”

Kraglin knelt in front of him. The cockpit lights sizzled through Yondu’s eyelids, blue-stained by his capillaries and divided around Kraglin’s silhouette.

“I know sir,” said the man who’d sworn his flame to him the week before Stakar cast him out, then shrugged and tagged along. “But sir, don’tchu dare give up. I can’t lose ya, you hear me? I don’t understand – I dunno what the fuck’s goin’ on, but – but we can get through it. You an’ me together. You get me, sir? Cause I got you. I always, _always_ got you.”

The pain had ebbed noticeably now. Yondu squirmed slightly, just to test it. Nope. No sudden lance introduced to his gizzards. Weird.

“I can’t lose ya again sir,” Kraglin continued.

Should Yondu speak up? Mention that death didn’t actually feel so imminent anymore?

No – didn’t want to get the guy’s hopes up. Who knew when the pain would be back?

He kept his eyes clamped shut, jaw clenched, braced for the worst. Kraglin’s shaky benedictions smattered over him like the drizzle on Alpha-Centauri-IV, where all this nonsense began.

“Please sir. You mean the flarkin’ galaxy to me. Ain’t no one who means more. I don’t gotta Peter, sir. I know you do, an’ I know what you got ain’t somethin’ I can get in the way of, but ya gotta understand what it feels like, watchin’ ya go leapin’ into space for the sake of one dumb Terran, gettin’ ya back again only for you to drop not a whole flarkin’ Standard later. I can’t go through with this again, sir. I swear it, not again.”

Yondu probed the soft skin of his paunch. It _squished_ more than usual, but nothing hurt. He didn’t think he was haemorrhaging internally either. How would you tell?

“Sir,” Kraglin continued. He smoothed his knobbly hands over Yondu’s cheeks, again and again, as if he could wipe the grimace from his features. That was kinda nice. Yondu relaxed, lolling as close to Kraglin’s lap as he could get without snapping any femurs.

Kraglin’s stroking became more frenzied.

“No – no! Don’t go! Don’t you dare go! I didn’t get to say none of this shit last time, bein’ as ya couldn’t be assed to open yer comm to me an’ say ‘Kraglin hon, I’m heading into space without a vac suit, I’m sorry’…”

Oh yeah. Yondu winced – internally only, being as his stomach was no longer eating him alive. Still, he supposed, if Kraglin had been sitting on this all that time since Quill & co. fished him from the black, letting him get it all out might be better in the long run. Therapeutic, y’know?

“But stars above, if this is my last chance I’m gonna take it. Sir, yer a stupid pig and I hate you.”

Not quite what Yondu was expecting. He frowned, ever-so-slightly, before letting his face go slack again.

“Yer always pickin’ fights,” Kraglin continued, high and shaky, “an’ sometimes I swear ya do shit _jus’_ to see how much I can take. Yer a damn brat, is what I guess I’m saying, sir. Ya smell worse than I do, and I’ve told ya so many times not to eat Beasties when we’re stuck in a tiny cave on some primitive rock together for a week because ya get gassier than a whole herd of moombas – but do ya listen?”

Yondu opted out of mentioning that this primitive rock was the original homestead of his species.

“You piss me off,” whispered Kraglin, bowing low over him. “You piss me off so flarkin’ much. Every hour of every cycle, sir.”

His whiskers clung to Yondu’s, locking them together like velcro. The moisture that dripped onto Yondu’s cheeks was so warm for a moment he suspected it must be snot. But while Kraglin’s sniff didn’t dispel that possibility, the hitching shudders of his breath lessened it considerably.

Yondu shrank. Stars. Now he _actually_ had to die, if only to spare himself this embarrassment.

“But I love ya, sir.” The words broke over Yondu in a spasm, squeezed up from Kraglin’s chest in sobbing fits. “I love ya so damn much, you reckless little blue _shit;_ please don’t leave me alone again, please –“

“Your cabin is filthy,” said Vileska, clambering up the ladder plasma-pistol first. “But I can’t find any contraband. I suppose you’re free to go.” She took in the tableau before her: Kraglin even uglier than usual, all weasellish and puffy around the eyes, Yondu dramatically draped before him. “Uh. Is he…?”

Yondu, grateful for the excuse, pushed himself to sit. He ignored Kraglin’s soundless guppy-impressions. “Alive an’ kickin’. An’ the reason y’ain’t found no illegal shit is because, like I told ya, _we’s on our honeymoon._ ”

Vileska tipped her visor in his direction. “Excuse me, but weren’t you ill a minute ago?”

“Sorry about that.” Yondu batted away Kraglin’s trembling fingers. He helped himself to a handful of wiring from a loose wall casing instead, using it to heave himself vaguely upright. “Spot of indigestion.”

“Indigestion?” repeated Kraglin and Vileska in the same scandalized tone.

Yondu patted his belly, mock-cheerful. A few lingering pokers jabbered at his guts, but they were lukewarm rather than of the red-hot variety. “S’better now. Thanks fer askin’.”

If Kraglin’s eye twitched any harder he’d develop spontaneous epilepsy. “I – I can’t believe you’d – sir – sir, you fuckin’ – you fuckin’ well” –

“Well,” said Vileska, slinking back down the ladder. She’d reholstered her pistol, having made the reasonable assumption that Kraglin was a greater threat to Yondu than to her. “That’s my search conducted. Enjoy the rest of your honeymoon, gentlemen.”

On the battery plinth, the light on Kraglin’s suit flipped from red to blue. He snatched it, storming to the bathroom. Yondu, still cradling his tender stomach, stepped shakily after him. “Hey, I called dibs –“

“No,” growled Kraglin, already yanking down his zip and fanning the first of the electrodes through the burnt-shiny patches in his chest hair. “No, _Yondu._ Yer gonna stay right the fuck there, until I can punch ya properly.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Who's in the Smacking Yondu (lovingly) club? Up next: a big ol' Ravager boy punch up. Because that's the only way these idiots deal with emotions. As always, thank you so much for every kudos/comment!**


	4. Chapter 4

Most people agreed that punches made for poor foreplay.

Ravagers weren’t most people.

Yondu intercepted Kraglin’s knuckles with his chin. He took the blow with dignity, poise, and a mouthful of blood, spat in Kraglin’s face with all the eloquence of a love sonnet.

No teeth followed, which was a novelty, but they shuddered down to their roots.

Kraglin’s suit sparked. Lightning zapped between his fingers. He reformed his fist.

Yondu worked his jaw in languid revolutions. Between being stuck around Kraglin’s knot and this more recent tenderizing, it had suffered quite the day.

Kraglin, for some reason, wasn’t sympathetic. In fact, lips pulled back from his puffy pink gums, he squared up to Yondu and swung back his arm to continue.

Yondu blocked him. His arm caught Kraglin’s crossways. The exeskelesuit sputtered, guttering from the effort it took to deflect the clash. When Kraglin made to break the lock and drive his knee into Yondu’s gut, Yondu pre-empted him.

He ducked, swooping behind him in a swirl of grubby leather.

 _Smack, smack, smack._ One palm on Kraglin’s nape, shoving his head forwards chin-to-heaving-chest. The other on his wrist, yanking his punching arm so far behind him that the shoulder joint popped.

Kraglin wouldn’t mind. Hraxian joints might not be the most durable, but they moved in all sorts of interesting and nauseating ways. Kraglin could pull off contortions that made the most hardened Ravagers barf. On a more practical level, it also allowed him to squeeze his bundle of bones through vent systems even Terran kids struggled with.

Yondu achieved much the same ends by being of a squishy disposition, able to compress himself into spaces far tighter than his appearance let on. However, it didn’t look nearly as impressive to ooze out of a duct as it did to unfold like a spider. Point of the matter: Kraglin could take it. Yondu could, too – wasn’t like his mug could get any uglier.

“Caught ya,” he purred, voice as dirty as the ear he nuzzled.

Mistake.

Kraglin flung his head back. Rather than his skull caving around Yondu’s nose – a potential outcome, had he not been suited up – he bashed Yondu hard enough to add another kink.

“Shid! Fugk!”

Kraglin made no comment. That was weird too. No jangling laugh, no taunts, no descriptions of what he was gonna do once he had his captain on his knees. Yondu clutched the dripping mash of his nose, staggering back.

Kraglin’s arm clicked back into place. His bones shifted under their coating of tight-pulled skin and baggy leather with an audible series of pops.

His eyes snapped to Yondu’s. They took in the cascade of blood messing the front of Yondu’s coat, webbing between his fingers, a blue reservoir cupped in each palm. And, rather than conceding the match, they narrowed.

Shit.

Hand-to-hand wasn’t Yondu’s specialty. It had been, once, before they melted the yaka quartz to his skull. But disregarding the occasional incident when he got stuck up shit creek without a paddle – or, more accurately, dropped into Kree barracks without an arrow – Yondu very rarely needed to fling fists at people.

Kraglin, on the other hand, took great enjoyment out of driving his skinny limbs into noses, groins and solar plexuses of anyone who crossed him. Sometimes he even made sure his suit was fully powered first.

This time was one of them. Yondu backed up until his back thumped the wall, waving a blood-drenched hand in front of him while the other struggled to bung the bleed.

“Shid, wash eadin’ you?”

Kraglin didn't reply. He raised his fists again, dropping into the lax-but-ready stance of a boxer, and waited.

Yondu pushed off the wall. Whatever Peashooter had done to his innards, it left him woozy and lightheaded – although that could also be due to the nosebleed.

Kraglin wanted a fight? Yondu’d indulge him. But it wasn’t gonna be fun if he couldn’t stay on his feet.

“Uh,” he said, pulling faces to distract from the drool of blood over his lips. “You wanna dell me wash yer problem, or are we gonna seddle this the old-fashiondt way?”

“You,” hissed Kraglin, stalking towards him, “said like you was dyin’.”

Yondu tentatively let go of his nose, long enough to waggle both hands. “Ta-da! I ain’t.” He grabbed it again, before the bloody river could gush out, or Kraglin land another punch.

But Kraglin didn’t even try to pulverize what remained of his nasal cartilage. Instead his hand dropped, with deceptive lightness, on Yondu’s shoulder.

Yondu’d seen him do this a hundred times before. Get all up close and personal, then concentrate the charge in his suit and flip his opponent over his shoulder in a sizzling arc of sparks.

So why had he yet to do it? Turn Yondu topsy-turvy; bring him brutally down on the crazy-paving of stained and charred metal slabs that constituted the cockpit floor?

Yondu waited for it. And waited, and waited.

Kraglin’s battle prowess failed to manifest. He shuddered instead, glare trained on Yondu’s boots. Little shivers, fierce and furious. Like all his sentiments had expanded, overflowing Kraglin’s fool head.

Yondu uncupped his nose.

“Uh,” he said. “Did ya _actually_ believe it back then? That I was dyin’?”

Kraglin considered the question.

“Nah,” he said eventually, releasing Yondu and stepping away. He sniffed, puffing his chest out to fill the front of his jumpsuit, which was stretched from years of Yondu grabbing it to hustle him into storage cupboards and private corners. “Just indigestion, sir. Like ya said.”

“Indigestion,” Yondu repeated.

He tentatively squeezed his gut. Peashooter failed to squirm. Failed to do anything, in fact – but when he pushed away from the wall and stood on his own two feet, Kraglin’s hand still weighing on his clavicle, he could’ve sworn he felt something _slop._

It didn’t hurt anymore, though. Ergo, Kraglin was the bigger concern.

If there was one skill Yondu never mastered, it was saying sorry. Apologies resulted in a reaction so strong it bordered allergic. Even within his own head.

Kraglin eyed his hand, which had snuck up his sleeve to scratch. “You got a rash or something, sir?”

“Nah, I’m just –“

“Can indigestion even like, cause rashes? Is that a thing?”

“It ain’t a rash! I… I was just thinkin’, y’know? Don’tchu wanna nookie or somethin’? Lil’ scuffle like that enough to get yer blood back up? You call the shots; ain't gonna stop ya.”

Kraglin shook his head. “We ain’t kids no more, sir.”

Yondu frowned. If violence didn’t work, and sex was off the table, what other way did they have to communicate?

He didn’t know. And frankly, finding out sounded like way too much effort.

“Scuse me,” he said, shuffling past Kraglin. “My turn in the bathroom.”

* * *

The busted shower sat opposite the loo, forcing its residents to contemplate it as they went about their business. Every time Yondu laid eyes on it, he thought to himself _huh, I oughta fix that_. Every time he went out the door, he forgot.

Mending it would be simple, albeit time consuming. Yondu went through the mental processes of it as he worked the clasp on his belt loose, let his pants slump to his knees, and followed them down.

There wasn’t no seat – just a fold-out pan and a vacuum flush that activated once you tipped it back into the wall. The icy metal gnawed on Yondu’s ass, and his nose plipped navy beads to splatter in the pan, rolling gently down the incline.

Yondu bore the frigid dig in his thighs until he was certain no liquefied internal bits were due to come gushing out of any one of his holes. Grumbling to himself, he stood and tipped the pan back into the wall, flushing it out of habit. The rumble and suck of the vacuum disposal system almost drowned out the similar growl from his guts.

Shit, he was hungry. It struck all of a sudden – a different pang to the acidic sensation that had stripped away the inside of his pouch before.

He needed something. Something far more substantial than lunch – put off to deal with Vileska – and breakfast, which had been a stomachful of Hraxian jizz.

He’d initially planned on fishing Peashooter out there and then, dumping him in the basin and giving him a stern talking to, if not a whistle. But – well. He _had_ sorta sprung the little guy’s new living conditions on him. And the kid had settled now, so if he’d already bored his way into Yondu’s intestine and was feasting on his entrails, heading off to forage for lunch couldn’t do _more_ damage, surely.

When you’d suffered a lot of pain in your life, it became very… _situational._ It lasted until it didn’t, and then you could forget about it again. Some pains lingered longer than others. A whipping could still sting after a fortnight, and the occasional phantom flare from his crest still piked Yondu in the spine if he twisted wrong in the night.

The pain caused by Peashooter had been intense, but mercifully short. Yondu had forgiven worse trespasses. You only had to look at Quill to see that.

“Awright,” he said, peeling up his shirt just enough to poke the bulge. The _additional_ bulge; yeah, yeah. “Food first, lil’ guy. Then I work out what to do with ya.”

Beasties didn’t appeal. Yondu opened the packet, took a sniff (crackly with drying blood) and dropped it again.

Kraglin slouched in the rec room. Having busied himself with charting their course towards the portal, he now chewed on an old stem of yaro root, gnashing the fibrous wood between his molars.

“Y’gonna seal that up proper-like?” he asked, nodding to the Beasties. “You’ll only bitch if they go stale.”

Yondu could do without his nagging. “Gonna seal you up proper-like in a minute.”

“What does that even _mean?_ ”

“Wouldn’t ya like to know.”

Yondu worked through their cupboards. He retrieved a dehydrated rat-pack and a selection of dried beans from the corners, sniffing them one by one before casting them aside.

Kraglin, chomping away, watched with vague intrigue as Yondu rifled through one storage box to the next, upending the contents, muddling the flavors of cal-cubes and syrup bars (which he still kept a stash of, out of nostalgia for the days where Quill's cooperation could be ensured with aid of a saccharine treat).

“You hungry?” Kraglin eventually took it upon himself to ask.

“No, I’m obviously doin’ this for the shits an’ gigs. What’chu got there, Obfonteri?”

“Yaro root. Overripe. Tastes like I’m eatin’ the Twig.”

“Well, toss one over here, wouldya?”

Kraglin, amused, did so.

Yondu caught it, shaking out his stinging hand. When the suit was at full power, it took rather more concentration than Kraglin expended on his day-to-day life to calibrate the strength of his throwing arm. He raised it to his nostrils and took a slow and hopeful whiff.

Dirt. Scented wood. Something earthen and damp and entirely unappetizing.

Yondu tossed it at the worktop. “Dammit,” he hissed.

Kraglin scurried forwards to retrieve it, fretting over the dent in the root’s side. “Aw, thas gonna bruise! We can’t store this.”

“So eat it now. Yer far too skinny.”

Kraglin’s pout might’ve suited a goldfish. “Ya _know_ my metaby-whassit don’t work like that…”

“Oh boo-hoo, mister ‘I can drink an entire fuckin’ crate of Kadarashi honey-mead an’ not put on a pound’. I feel _so_ sorry for ya.”

Yondu stuck his head in the last cupboard in the line, pulling out the protein-porridge packs they kept around in case of engine failure or other such associated emergencies. The overlay of dust indicated that they were rather out-of-date, but Yondu convinced himself it’d be fine. A few weevils never did any harm. Added crunch, that.

The porridge, reconstituted with a squirt from their water reserves, was a bland and mealy mush. Yondu scarfed it down. Kraglin, finishing his second yaro root, crossed to spit the stalk into the waste receptacle set into the rec room’s wall, where it would be added to the pasted slab of refuse due to be sold to the matter remodellers on Knowhere.

“That good, sir?” His raised eyebrow betrayed his doubts.

Yondu nodded, cramming as much of the bowl’s contents into his mouth as would fit. Usually, he considered himself to be in possession of a refined palate, satiated only by Beasties and moonshine. But the craving hit hard and fast, and Yondu’s spoon scraped the bowl far too soon. Kraglin observing, ruminatively picking root mulch from between his teeth.

“If ya get through all our emergency stock between here an’ Knowhere, you can fork out for the next load.”

Yondu put his spoon down, burped, and added the plastic empties to the tumble-washer, alongside the others awaiting steam-blasting. “Rude. We’s on our honeymoon an’ all. Ain’t we supposed to share shit, as a coupla newly-weds?”

“Like why we thought it’d be funny to pretend to die in the middle of a Nova boardin’?” Kraglin shook his head before Yondu could cook up some suitable excuse that had nothing to do with tadpoles and pouches and crippling pain. “Forget it. Look sir, the day we do a proper bonding ceremony and ya make an honest man of me, _then_ ya can start dippin’ into my bank accounts.”

Kraglin didn’t technically _have_ a bank account. Kraglin had stashes of unit chits, gold ingots, Kree doubloons and every other currency known to spacefarers hidden around the _Quadrant_ , and the _Warbird_ too.

He liked to believe Yondu didn’t know about them. Yondu let him keep his fantasies. Weren’t like he’d ever lick from those honeypots – Ravagers didn’t steal from each other. He might have a reputation as a codebreaker, but one exile was enough to learn him his lesson.

“Aw, Kragkins! Izzat a promise?”

Kraglin swung at him again. This time, it wasn’t designed to connect. Yondu tilted his head into it, just to have an excuse to throw his own punch, and back and forth and back and forth until Yondu caught Kraglin in a headlock and Kraglin barged his elbow uselessly into Yondu’s groin.

There were some bonuses to not having the standard meat-and-veg afforded to most male specimens in this galaxy.

Yondu smirked victoriously down at him. At which point Kraglin, realizing the flaw in his plan, switched tactics.

He wrapped a skinny arm around his thighs, channelled the charge through his exeskelesuit, and _heaved…_

* * *

“You still goddit,” said Yondu later, dabbing away his second nosebleed of the day. “I’ll give ya that. Course, I’d be able to take ya any day without the suit.”

Kraglin dunked his flannel, sponging the blood from their tiny kitchen counter top. He looked despicably pleased with himself. “Course ya would.”

“Or if I whistled.”

“S’right, sir.”

“So long as you know.” Yondu daringly removed his sleeve from his nostrils. No more blood burst out, but the taste of copper overpowered that of his oats. “Hey, I’mma turn in early.”

“Why? I wear ya out?”

“As if. Gotta work a bit harder than that.”

Kraglin grinned. His lead teeth shimmered like he’d oiled them. He tugged Yondu’s hips forwards, bumping their netherbits, and while he’d _said_ he weren’t up for another round, and they _were_ both getting on a bit, and Yondu _was_ genuinely tired, he couldn’t stop thinking about what Kraglin said about _lil’ plugs_ and _bendin’ ya over the bed_ and _takin’ my pick of yer holes…_

“Sir, yessir,” Kraglin breathed. He licked the blood off Yondu’s lips, then, daringly, slipped his tongue between them.

It was... nice _._

Kraglin’s mouth was sour and soft. It tasted a lot like yaro root and a little bit like Yondu’s spunk. Yondu rubbed their tongues together, before nibbling on Kraglin’s skinny underlip, bruising it to a plumpness better suited to kissing.

Kraglin approved of his endeavors, if the groan and the hand shoved under his top was any indication.

Yondu reciprocated, clawing at the loose leather between Kraglin’s shoulders and dragging his nails down sharp enough to raise weals on the hairy hide beneath. He was about to send his hands in search of Kraglin’s buttocks – might take him a while; damn things were practically concave – when the fingers skirting his chest froze.

Yondu’s brow scrunched. “Krags?”

Kraglin was frowning too. He concentrated the artificial strength of his exeskelesuit into his hands. He used one to pin Yondu to the wall by his collarbone, while the other wrestled his shirt up to tuck under his pits.

Yondu twisted, prosthetic clanking against the pipes. “You wanna suck my non-existent nips, all ya gotta do is ask–“

“Shaddup, sir.”

“Kinky mood, huh?”

“I said shaddup.”

Yondu shut.

Kraglin studied his chest like it was a particularly interesting specimen up for dissection. Mad Scientist and Patient wasn't Yondu's favorite roleplay, but if Kraglin worked his fingers inside him again, he might be swayed. His innie clenched at the thought, leaking a satin string of diluted pre-cum to squish in his hole-ridden briefs.

“What’chu lookin’ at?” he asked. A terrifying thought flashed through his mind. “Ain’t nothin’ come burstin’ out, right?”

Some deepspace parasites that could do that to a man. Get inside him, convince him he was fine, flood his brain with happy hormones as it feasted on his innards and exploded from his chest while the poor victim still had a smile on his face…

But when Yondu rubbed his chest, he found no open wounds. Didn’t find anything at all, in fact, except smooth blue skin.

Kraglin cracked his kiss-bitten lips. “Uh,” he croaked. “Where’s yer pouch gone, sir?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **MORE NONSENSE Thank you all so much for the lovely comments! I've been worked off my ass lately, but it's still a delight to get this fic out when I can. And thank you to everyone who stuck by King & Lionheart, too!**


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> slfdjglskjfgsdfg welp I forgot about this fic!! I'm so sorry! My life's been pretty hectic lately, between writing for another fandom, work, and working through edits on original projects! I hope you enjoy the update <3 I'll try to get the last chapter up soon!
> 
> **MISCARRIAGE TW**

“You did _what?_ ”

Yondu stomped through the central hold, barging open the door. “It seemed like a good idea at the time! Look, I don’t give a shit what’chu think – I just gotta work out how to get it _out!_ ”

Kraglin’s eyes were glassy as the baubles that cluttered Yondu’s half of the cockpit. “You did _what?_ ” he repeated.

“Ya already said that, dipshit!”

“Sorry sir, I'm still in shock that'chu would take a flarkin' unknown alien species and _put it inside yer body!_ ”

Yondu sneered, spinning on his heel and bouncing his palm off Kraglin’s temple. “How else was I s'pposed to smuggle it past the Nova?”

Kraglin crossed his arms. “Ya never let _me_ play with yer pouch.”

“Yer _jealous?_ Seriously?”

“No! Course I ain't – jealous? Pffb.”

Yondu groaned, massaging his temples “This is _ridiculous_.”

“No shit. Glad to see yer finally talkin’ sense.”

Yondu might mean it, when he said that they were no longer captain and subordinate, but having this level of lip levelled at him _outside_ of the bedroom was gonna get pretty wearing pretty fast. He sneered at Kraglin and continued through the cabin, gauging the new pressure in his gut.

Peashooter wasn’t a hard nodule. Instead, it felt like there was _liquid_ in there. It _sloshed_.

Tadpoles weren’t supposed to _slosh._

“Where ya goin’?” Kraglin trundled behind. “Sir?”

Yondu ground his teeth so the metal caps clipped and sparks stung his gums. “T’sort this out,” he said flatly, entering the poky anterior cupboard at the back of the hold, which served as a medbay.

It was a rudimentary set-up, only used for emergencies. This more than qualified. They didn’t have any scanners; no medibots programmed to search the intergalactic practitioners’ database, cross-reference symptoms and accordingly treat. There were just a bunch of sterile bandage packs, tranq darts, medibeads, several squashy bags of universal sanguine-substitute and – there!

A pack of scalpels, still sealed.

Yondu grabbed them, along with a gauze strip long enough to wrap around his belly several times over and a tincture in a little glass phial that promised to ward off infections.

He didn’t check the expiration date on the bottom of the package. He didn’t want to know.

Ducking from the lightless alcove, he swaggered back past Kraglin, eyes fixed on the middle distance. Or, rather, on their cabin, at the far side of the hold. 

Kraglin bobbed by his shoulder, craning over to peer at his armful. “Um. Sir?”

Yondu kept walking.

“Sir, what’chu gonna do with them knives?”

Yondu tapped the lock panel on the cabin; the door sprung obediently open. Kraglin paused only to grab something else from the medical cabinet, before he followed him in.

“I _really_ hope you’re not just gonna cut it out, y’know? I _really_ hope that ain’t what yer plannin’ on doin’.”

After selecting a few of the cleaner towels he and Kraglin had used to sponge up the mess from earlier, Yondu arranged them on the lower of the bunks and plonked himself down. He rolled his shirt once more to crinkle over his pectorals – then, after a thought, stripped it off entirely.

“You got a better idea?” he asked.

“Yes!” Kraglin wrung his hands, joints a touch too loose and bones a touch too long to make it a comfortable viewing experience. “We getcha to Knowhere, sir. There’s quacks there, they’ll set’chu right. An’ there’s the Collector!”

Yondu, for the first time in living memory, folded his shirt on removal. He wasn’t _procrastinating_ from performing a self-inflicted operation without anaesthetic. Just. Y’know. Taking his time.

“What about the Collector?” he asked.

“He’ll know what that thing is! He’ll be able to tell ya whas goin’ on!”

Yondu placed the right shirt sleeve over the left, then the left sleeve over the right. Then reversed his order. “I don’t give a shit whas goin’ on. I want it out.”

“But sir –“

“Leave it, Krags.” When Kraglin failed to move, Yondu brandished the scalpel in Kraglin’s direction. “If you ain’t gonna help, you can go.”

“Go?” Kraglin’s hands fluttered, painting mumchance murals. “Go _where?_ Do _what?_ ”

“Dunno. Go check out the stars. Meant to pretty round these here parts.” Yondu stretched the skin under his ribs, praying the pouch lip would suddenly pop open.

Who knew? Perhaps Kraglin had been mistaken. Perhaps he’d just _mislaid_ his pouch in the poor lighting. Or – even better – this might all be some freakishly realistic dream.

Any moment now, Yondu told himself. Any moment. His eyes would snap open, and he’d be back in his bed on the _Eclector,_ Kraglin kipping besides. They’d rouse in a carousel of groans, snores, pillows over the face, farts and cusses, and goad each other into clothes before heading about their days.

Quill’d be there, flame on his sleeve, back where he belonged. Grinning when he saw Yondu, giving him the chest thumps – or, more likely, one of his sloppy Terran salutes.

Rest of his li’l gang could tag along too. They all looked good in red leather. Like a team, a unit. Like they was his.

“I ain’t gonna _watch the stars_ while you cut yerself open!” Kraglin snapped.

Yondu jerked, back in the present. His scalpel was in his fist, but his resolve floated far behind them, bobbing in the black with the ejected tadpoles in the orbit of a gas giant around Riegel-III.

“Stay here then,” he croaked. “See the show fer yerself.”

Kraglin shook his head. “I ain’t jus’ gonna stay put while ya _kill_ yerself neither!”

Yondu’s reflection glinted back at him from Kraglin’s watery eyes, each a faint, watery blue in contrast to Yondu’s pink. It was as if over the years they’d known each other, a little of Yondu’s essence percolated Kraglin and a little of Kraglin’s edged into him.

Kraglin exhaled, letting some of the tension unwind from his back.

“Okay,” he said shakily. “Okay, sir. I ain’t goin’ nowhere.” He closed the distance between them and knelt before Yondu, one hand behind him.

Yondu gripped the scalpel. The handle dug into the soft meat of his palms. “If this don’t end well…”

“Don’t talk like that, sir.”

“I want’chu to tell Quill…”

Kraglin rested a skeletal hand on his knee. “I know, sir. Ya don’t got to say it.”

Yondu shook his head, scalpel trembling a press away from a cut. “Nah, I want’chu to tell him… That I’m the one who filled his boots with pepper beetle shells after that job he messed up on Gravaria. Y’know, where he got us banned from that whole system after ‘illegally manipulating’ the Duchess. Couldn’t officially punish him, cause he made us a bagload of money, but he fucked our prospects on that world for the next decade, so… Pepper beetles.”

Kraglin’s hand retreated. “He thought that was me.”

Yondu nodded morosely along. “Uh huh.”

“You _punished_ me for that.”

“Uh huh.”

“Week on bilge duty.”

“Yep.”

“Stars, you dick.”

“Uh-huh. An’ – an’ y’know that job where the bomb exploded early an’ I told ya I’d set it to Skrull hours like I was supposed to, said it were a wirin’ fault an’ got us all to go gank the supplier in vengeance?”

“Shit – that time we nearly lost Horuz? When Volker’s eye got burnt out?”

“Yeah, that one.” Yondu dropped his voice to a miserable husk. “I set it to Kree hours. Force o’habit.”

“Fucking hell, sir.”

“An’ that time –“

“Okay, that’s enough.” Kraglin cupped Yondu’s chin roughly, turning his face into the light. The prick in his neck barely registered, just like a skeeter bite back on Alpha Centauri-IV. “No more confessions. Else I might haveta rethink that whole lovin’ you thing.”

Yondu scowled. For some reason, it formed slowly, like his ligaments had been replaced with treacle. “Quit… sayin’ it… out loud.” The room span. “Why’s… why’s everything…?”

“Because I just injected you with a tranq,” said Kraglin, pulling out the needle and tossing it on the floor. Looked mighty pleased with himself too.

Yondu’s mouth dropped open. “Oh,” he slurred. “You… You _shit…_ ”

Kraglin patted his knee. “Ya might thank me for it one day,” he said.

Yondu tried to channel the last of his energy into plunging the scalpel into Kraglin’s nearest bodypart. When that failed, he expended a burst of vitriolic desperation on stabbing himself in the stomach. Kraglin caught his wrist just in time.

Yondu’s hold on the knife slackened. Slipped. It sagged tip-first towards his chest, but Kraglin was there to catch it, like Kraglin was always fucking there, watching his back, guarding it too, and occasionally slipping tranq needles into it when the mood overtook him.

“Fuck you,” he burbled, although if he couldn’t understand the nonsense-string filtering into his ears, Kraglin had no chance. “A-hole.”

Couldn’t even squeeze his lips together to whistle, teach Kraglin a lesson he’d never forget. By lieu of being dead, that was.

Could dead people forget things? Yondu certainly remembered nada concerning his time in the bacta tank. Just the choke of sludge in his lungs, the oppressive darkness, the certitude that he’d died alone with no fireworks over his grave and now he was gonna float in the drowning black _forever…_

He fought unconsciousness, even as the numbness expanded from his fingertips to the broad plane of his chest, to his tongue and his puffy, twice-broken nose. His bruised eyelids crept closed, and with each blink it became harder to prop them open.

“M’sorry.” Kraglin’s voice washed towards him on a tidal surge of Lethe. “But I ain’t watchin’ ya die for the third fuckin’ time.”

* * *

Consciousness squirmed back several hours later. How many? Yondu’s chronometer blurred, and the closer he brought it to his face the more the bright lights flowed together, wavering in a nebulous neon streak.

“Kraglin,” he tried to say. It didn’t quite make it out.

His fingers flexed on air. Nothing in them. What was supposed to be there? What was he supposed to be holding?

Kraglin’s hand? Eugh, no way. Something even slimmer than that, chilly and sharp and –

_Scalpel._

Peashooter.

Pouch – or lack thereof.

Parasites and pain and slow-encroaching, sticky, dissolvable death.

Yondu slammed upright. His breath left him in too-sharp wheezes. The ring in his ears intensified to deafening. He clapped both hands over them, simultaneous, saving himself perforated eardrums only because he missed.

The room swirled in drunken loop-the-loops. Everything distended, warping like they were making another seven hundred spacewarp jumps in a row. His protein porridge scrambled up the back of his throat, making a bid for freedom. Yondu brutally gulped it back down.

He squeezed his eyes shut and opened them again. It didn’t help much, so he pulled up his knees, buried his head between them, and waited for everything to stop spinning.

Seeing as he was in prime position for naval gazing, he took the chance to study his bare stomach. He could always pray, after all, that Kraglin had been overcome by a fit of mercy in the middle of the night cycle and performed the operation while he was unconscious.

No such luck. Just that awful blank swathe of blue, curving gently around podge and Peashooter.

This time Yondu let the porridge fill his cheeks before swallowing again, fuzzy tongue stroking the acid film off his teeth.

“How ya doin’?” Kraglin lurked in the corner of the room. Yondu wouldn’t know he was there if he hadn’t spoken; his slim red streak of a form got lost amid the overpowering glare of lights off greasy metal.

Yondu opened his mouth only once convinced that words would come out, rather than yester-cycle’s dinner. “Ya drugged me.”

“Twice, seein’ as we’re doin’ confessions.”

Yondu attempted to burrow his head through his kneecaps, or vice versa. “Twice?”

“Yeah. Ya probably don’t remember that other one. Don't think ya actually woke up – just wanted to be sure.”

“You’re a dick,” Yondu told him. He couldn’t yet see the details, but Kraglin’s tone more than conveyed his smirk.

“Takes one to know one, sir. Still, you’ll be pleased t’know we’re at the Collector’s, so now ya got the choice of walkin’ yerself or me tranqin’ ya again and carryin’ ya.”

“Ya _wouldn’t._ ”

Kraglin smugly patted the electrodes suckered to his neck. “All charged up an’ ready.”

When Yondu continued to brace himself on his knees and breathe like he’d run a marathon, his ashen wedge of a face softened around the edges. That, or Yondu’s vision was just misting up.

“Sir, I told ya. I ain’t lettin’ you die. Not even if ya want to. You an’ me, we’re goin’ out together.”

Yondu tenderly pressed on his gut. The pouch flesh squidged under his fingertips, disconcertingly spongy. No morning wriggles from Peashooter. Nothing at all, in fact.

Who knew – perhaps the tranquilizer affected him too?

“Sounds like yer issuin’ a challenge,” he said, just to make Kraglin scowl. “Alright. We’ll go pay the stars-damn Collector a visit. If there’s anythin’ left of Peashooter, it’s all his.”

* * *

The Collector’s room was, as always, a scene cut straight from a nightmare. It had undergone refurbishment since the last time he entertained Ravager guests. Gouges in the wall indicated some sort of explosion, strong enough to propel chunks of shattered glass cell from one side of the hall to the other. What the incendiary might’ve been, Yondu couldn’t tell.

The Terran pup in its spacesuit yipped at the newcomers. He accepted the treat Tivvan slipped into his food-hatch with relish.

Other races pressed mournful faces to the glass, breathing mist from nostrils and gills. Some showed interest in the visitors; more cowered; most sat silent and still.

The Collector himself stooped dramatically over Yondu. He peered at his pouch, bared through the open seam of his coat. Yondu, wondering whether he ought to have invested in rip-away pants to complete the stripperific look, glanced over his shoulder to ensure the man’s serving girls weren’t tittering. They maintained their guard, demure smiles locked in place.

“So?” He quashed the urge to close his coat, back away, and toss on another several layers of leather; anything to escape that scrutiny. “You want it?”

Standing, the Collector rubbed his hands. “My, my. What a generous offer.”

“So long as ya match our price, yeah. Me an’ Krags worked real hard, sneakin’ this out of that backwater. Lost some damn expensive equipment too, so we gotta make ends meet.”

“Oh yes.” Tivvan tilted his head to peer at Kraglin over the prow of his nose. “Your little lackey. Hraxian, is he not? How awfully… _common._ ”

Yondu cleared his throat – as much a warning to Kraglin as an interjection. Tivvan might be a fruit – and a stuck-up ponce of one at that – but he was a fruit that paid well. If Yondu left him alone with Kraglin and his knife collection, the Galaxy would be down another eccentric freak who treated sentient creatures like they were things, but Yondu and Kraglin would be down a reliable contractor too.

It took hard graft, to build up a stable business after spending so much time clinging to the edge of the game board by your fingernails. Stakar’s pardon wouldn’t mean anything if Yondu didn’t work his grubby socks off to prove what he was capable of (quite a feat; he’d worn them so long he suspected they’d fused to his toes). He had to earn back trust and prove Stakar right, before he started rolling in the big bucks again.

“Kraglin ain’t my lackey,” he said, brushing aside the _common_ comment to smooth from Kraglin’s ruffled hackles later. “He’s my partner nowadays.” 

“ _Partners_.” How Tivvan managed to squeeze that word around the breadth of his smirk, Yondu didn’t know, but it was quite the feat. “Interesting. Very well. Consider your price matched. That is, of course, assuming that I am free to do as I please with the specimen?”

“I don’t give a shit.” Yondu scooped at the wet lump in his pouch, gathering it together with a grimace. It hung like wet cement, weighing him down. “I just want it _out._ ”

Tivvan pursed his lips. “I daresay you do. Not to worry – your pouch will open of its own accord before the remains go septic. I am sorry for your loss, but rest assured, Mr Udonta, your child’s death will not be without merit. While a number of your kind were introduced to our galaxy before the Nova placed the Silver Spiral under isolation, I have never had the opportunity to study a Centaurian nymph in the pupating stage.”

That was rather too much for Yondu to compute. “W-whaddy-what now?”

The Collector’s eyebrows angled down. “A Centaurian nymph – one of your kind before it reaches secondary phase of gestation. And yes, it is very much dead. That tends to happen to underdeveloped foetal matter when you inject their carrier with high-grade knock out drugs.”

If any blood had been left in Kraglin’s face, it took the chance to evacuate.

“What? Yer sayin’ I, I killed –“

“Centaurian nymph?” Yondu repeated, more bewildered by the second. “That ain’t – I don’t – we aren’t –“

“I killed a _baby?_ ”

“Yes,” said the Collector, closing his kohl rimmed eyes. “To both.”

By the time those eyes reopened, Kraglin and Yondu were staring at each other, agog.

“I killed,” Kraglin repeated, his long hands spasming mid-air. “Your fuckin’ baby?”

“That was a Centaurian?” Yondu was still stuck on that point. “No way!”

The Collector sighed. “Like I said. Nymph.”

Yondu gawped at him. “It had a _tail,_ ” he said, the affronted tone filtering through to him as if from a distance. “A _tail._ It were black, it didn’t have _teeth_. It didn’t look nothin’ like me!”

“Centaurians have a two-stage gestation. Once the father’s pouch has sealed, they rearrange themselves on a molecular level before emerging as recognisable children – rather like Terran butterflies.” The Collector feigned concern. “I’m surprised you don’t know your own species’s life cycle, Mr. Udonta.”

Mr. Udonta didn’t rise to that bait. His sob-story wouldn’t be bandied around for the Collector’s amusement. “So you’re sayin’… If I’dda left him in there long-term…”

“They,” Tivvan corrected. “Sex only develops during secondary gestation. Although of course, this is all hypothetical. The information I glean from Kree dissection annals is nothing compared to an opportunity to study the real thing…”

Yondu again chose to ignore that, for the sake of his own future prospects if nothing else. Alienating the Collector wasn’t an option. The man was a freak, and while he paid well, if Yondu actually _thought_ about it, there wasn’t much difference between keeping a zoo-like menagerie of rare creatures as pets or slaves.

The easiest solution was not to think about that at all. Yondu embarked on it with vigor.

“Get back to the point. If I’d left li’l Peashooter here in my pouch…”

Kraglin gulped, the knobble in his throat traveling almost from his collarbones to his chin. “If I hadn’t _murdered it,_ ya mean. Shit, sir. I’m so –“

“It woulda been a person,” Yondu said, oblivious to everything but the Collector’s twisted smirk. “Yer sayin’ I used to be…”

Tivvan inclined his chin. “A tadpole, yes. Before your parents selected you from the pool in which you had survived your primary gestation phase. Now please – I will provide you a vessel in which to place the discarded tissue once your pouch opens. If you would deliver it back to me, I would reward you _most_ handsomely.”

Yondu and Kraglin competed to see who could struggle through their stuttering first and make sense.

“I – I – I, I _killed_ a…”

“W-wait! Why’d it hurt so much when I first put it in?”

Tivvan performed an extravagant sigh. “The tadpole would lose its form, and in doing so, secrete a substance that thinned your interior pouch wall to allow for a transfer of nutrients while it pupated. Hence why the tranquilizer affected it too. It wasn’t ready to cope with that level of narcotics, and ceased to reconstitute itself from the proto-soup.”

Kraglin brayed an ugly crack of a laugh. “It’s _dead,_ y’mean.”

“Yeah, Krags, we already established that.” Yondu shot him an eye-roll.

The Collector gestured to the door. “If that’ll be all, gentlemen? Udonta – I would predict, assuming you took the tranquilizer last night, that your pouch will split within the cycle. I recommend a thorough bathing after you have removed the remains.”

Yondu snorted. As for the prescribed bath? Well, he and Kraglin _were_ on their honeymoon. Sorta. Perhaps they deserved a day with their feet up in the nearest Kymellian massage spa.

Kraglin didn’t seem so cheerful. He tramped out the gate beside him, droopier than usual. His silence dangled weights from Yondu’s neck.

And, okay, so this visit had turned into quite the shocker. But Yondu expected Kraglin to babble about how crazy this all was, like Yondu himself was doing in the privacy of his head. Not… _Mope._

“What?” snapped Yondu, once he grew tired of the repetitive squelch of their boots through the mulch. “Quit actin’ like…”

“Like I murdered a fuckin’ baby?”

Yondu barged him with his elbow. “Stars, you’re such a diva. Weren’t no baby. Just goop.”

Kraglin righted himself, rubbing his smarting shoulder. His blue-gray eyes were wider and wetter than ever. “It was goop you wanted, sir!”

Yondu shook his head. They closed on the dock, boots ringing on steel-plated cartilage. “I didn’t know what the hell it were. Wanted a pet, not a brat. Ya helped me out big time. Anyways, prolly nicer for Peashooter to go out in his sleep” – Or in a sludge pile at the bottom of Yondu’s pouch – “Than bein’ snipped out surgeon-style. Did us all a favor, you did. Might even forgive ya for it.”

Kraglin sniffed. “Yeah?”

“Yeah.” Yondu leant in, squashing his lips against Kraglin’s highest neck tattoo, the one that fluttered in time with his pulse. “So long as ya make good on that thing with the plugs.”

Kraglin vibrated happily against him, a long and eager line, glitter sparking from the points where his exeskelesuit stuck to his skin. “Deal.”

All in all, it would’ve been very-almost perfect, had Martinex not chosen that moment to saunter around the corner.

He looked at Yondu and Kraglin, twinkling prettily as ever. Yondu and Kraglin looked at him.

“You two? Aren’t you supposed to be on Alpha Centauri?”

Yondu groaned. “We can’t _be_ on Alpha Centauri. That’s a star.”

“Speak for yourself. Pluvians can withstand temperatures exceeding that of most suns.”

“Show-off.”

Kraglin bared his teeth, misery forgotten. “What’re _you_ doin’ here? Followin’ us?”

Marty spared him a conciliatory smile. “I’m here for Tivvan. We have a job coming up that requires us to work together, and as much as I’m not fond of the man’s… _conservation efforts_ , I’m here to negotiate in my official capacity as Stakar’s second.” Marty’s expression brightened – not literally; the diamond was already damn blinding. “But I’m like, way more interested in what you guys are up to. And – hey, Yondu? Why aren’t you wearing a shirt?”

Yondu crossed his arms. This had two purposes – for one, it made him look like he weren’t taking none of Marty’s bullcrap, which he wasn’t; and for two, it hid the sealed-up line of his pouch. “Fashion statement.”

“Less a statement, more a cry for help.”

Yondu rolled his eyes. Like Marty wouldn’t have fucked him in a heartbeat back in the good ol’ pre-exile days. The pair of them had certainly shot the shit enough, playing chicken with words and rough touches in the back of an M-ship, alcohol fermenting on Yondu’s breath.

Anyway, that was past. They couldn’t all be un-aging hunks of quartz. Some of them _sagged_ as they got older, and hooked up with idiots like Kraglin who had a weird thing for bellies and thigh-pudge.

“Don’t tell him,” Kraglin stage-whispered, tugging Yondu’s arm. “He ain’t yer boss.”

Martinex stalked past them, closing on the Collector’s entranceway. “No worries. Tivvan will fill me in. Smuggling something, I bet.”

Wait.

Yondu had agreed to give Tivvan the remains of a dead Centaurian brat.

Yondu had tried to bring him live ones. And that meant…

That meant Yondu _had dealt in kids._ Again.

Shit. If Stakar Ogord was not a man who often doled out second chances, he never, ever offered anyone a third.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Big love to every commenter xx I read every one, even when I don't have time to reply. They mean the world.


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> CONTENT WARNING: Yondu thinks some very negative thoughts about atypical genitalia, and is pretty relaxed about the idea of People He Doesn't Care About being enslaved. This might be triggering for folks. It's the sort of thing I'd ideally have him called out on, but he doesn't say it out loud, which makes that tricky...

Yondu’s chest tightened. The blood drained from his face like he’d opened an artery.

“Cap’n?” Kraglin whispered. Then – whether because of Yondu’s buckling knees or the frozen mask of horror on his face – it clicked. “ _Shit._ Martinex. Martinex, don’t.”

Something in his voice made Martinex pause. He frowned, glancing at them over his shoulder. Then his eyes widened and he turned fully, taking a tentative step their way. “Yondu? Yondu, are you alright?”

Yondu couldn’t speak. Words fled from him, leaving nothing but ringing silence. He could hear himself breathing, but everything else was muted, from Kraglin’s increasingly urgent hisses of ‘Captain?’ to Martinex’s demands to know what was going on.

Cool crystal hands cupped his face, tilting him up to gaze into Marty’s. Kraglin protested this in typically sulky fashion, but Yondu couldn’t concentrate on him right now. Yondu couldn’t concentrate on anything but Marty’s yellow eyes: icy and orange-flecked, thin with confusion.

“Yondu?”

Yondu latched onto his wrists. His hands were shaking, and the sloppy weight in his pouch dragged him down.

They were _dead._ All of Peashooters brothers and sisters, and now Peashooter too. He’d killed them, shooting them out the airlock like… like fucking _scrap._ And sure, he hadn’t known, but that excuse didn’t fly last time, did it?

A look of awful understanding dawned on Marty’s face.

“What did you _do,_ ” he growled, and his grip on Yondu's temples tightened until he thought his skull might burst _._

“Martinex. Hey – hey, hey. Uh. Why don’tchu back up a bit, give cap’n some space?”

Martinex shook Kraglin's spindly hand off his shoulder. “What did you do?” he repeated. His glare never wavered, boring into Yondu, whose mouth worked soundlessly, lungs not drawing air. An empty pit yawned inside him as if Peashooter was rotting him out from within.

Kraglin nibbled his lips. “Let us come too,” he tried. “So’s we can explain?”

Martinex considered it. He released Yondu slowly – then, when his legs insisted on crumpling, steadied him with an arm around his waist before he could fold into the gutter with the rest of the garbage.

“Very well.”

Kraglin managed to control his temper. That was good – if it came to a match between the Pluvian and the low-grav dweller with the flaky exeskelesuit, Yondu knew which one of them would walk away. He still sneered at that arm, and at Yondu, just a little, for not shoving it off and insisting he could walk on his own. Yondu would like to – but right now, he wasn’t entirely sure he could.

In the end, Kraglin stalked ahead, leading them back towards the Collector’s door and all the grimy secrets stashed behind it, deeper into Knowhere’s labyrinthine slum. Yondu and Martinex followed. Yondu’s head drooped low, rushes of adrenaline breaking over him like ice-cold waves.

Over. It was all over. He’d finally gotten what he’d wanted (dreamed of; bribed and threatened and begged for when he had hungry crew and a kid to feed, until he realized Stakar had blocked his comm-sig). And now he’d thrown it all away.

“I’m calling Stakar,” Martinex told them, after delivering two swift raps to the entry request panel. “He might want to hear this.”

Yondu swallowed. It felt like trying to gulp down a handful of razor blades.

The Collector’s girl answered the door, her smile perfectly poised. She didn’t show any surprise at Yondu and Kraglin’s return.

“Lieutenant Martinex. Please, enter. My master will be with you shortly.”

Martinex’s voice sounded heavier than usual, as if he’d already given up hope. Still, he was unfailingly polite: “Tell him we’ve had a change of discussion topic, dear. Thank you.”

 _Flirt,_ Yondu wanted to mutter, but he wasn’t sure he could keep a steady voice.

They trudged through the foyer like they were heading to their execution. Martinex spoke quietly into his comm, but the thud of Yondu’s pulse in his ears was so loud that he barely heard the words.

Words like _assemble the captains,_ and _what the devil has that idiot done this time._

He went limper until Martinex was all but dragging him. When he dropped him on a chair, Yondu liquefied into it. It was only sheer willpower that stopped him flowing off onto the floor and finding a dark corner to curl up in.

No. He wouldn’t break. He _couldn’t._ Stakar had tossed him aside once, and he’d stood up all the stronger for it. He would do so again. He had to.

Yondu shut his eyes. He couldn’t even pretend that was convincing.

If the Collector was set off-balance by their reappearance, he didn’t broadcast it. “Well?” he asked, with a crook of his perfectly plucked eyebrows. “What’s this?”

“You may want to bring out some more chairs,” gritted Martinex. “We’re going to have company.”

“May I enquire who will be intruding on my hospitality?”

“Stakar Ogord,” said Martinex, while Yondu sat rigid as the average hull plate beside him. “Admiral of the Clans.”

The epithet was somewhat unnecessary - everybody who was anybody knew who Ogord was - but Martinex always had a flair for the dramatic. Usually, Yondu liked to make it a competition. Not today though. Not today.

Today Martinex’s hand clamped on his arm, preventing him from bolting. And the Collector watched, and the Collector noted, and the Collector’s eyes went wide.

“Oh my. Could this be about Udonta’s recent miscarriage?”

Martinex frowned. The diamonds in his forehead glanced off one another with a pretty little chime. “Excuse me? Oh – oh _stars._ What’s that smell?”

Yondu knew before the pain hit. He doubled over, wheezing. The Collector slammed his hands on the desk, bellowing for his girls to fetch a flask.

“Don’t let it fall out! Sit up, man! Get ahold of yourself!”

“What the hell’ve you put in your pouch?” Marty squeaked. Being as his nose was made of crystals, he couldn’t pinch it shut, and he wasn’t about to stoop to the indignity of shoving fingers up there. “It smells like something died!”

“Yeah,” Kraglin filled in, seeing as Yondu was too busy clutching his tender pouch where it split like an overripe peach. “You could say that.”

* * *

It didn’t take the captains long to converge on the Celestial’s head. Less time still for those with Solar wings. The Collector’s girls reported that Aleta and Stakar were stropping around the docks, waiting for their posse so that they could present a united front.

Yondu might’ve chuckled at the thought, had he not known what was at stake.

“Thanks for the shower,” he said gruffly. The Collector leaned away from him, covering his nose as he stepped out of the drying room, back in his leathers, sans-shirt. The line of his pouch was tender and puffy, sore to the touch.

“Alas, it didn’t do much good. I hope you treated the inside of your pouch to a more thorough bathing than the rest of you?”

“Aw. You care?”

“Well, I would rather you didn’t die of sepsis until you have agreed to sell me your cadaver…”

“No can do, whitey.” Yondu adjusted his coat in the vague hope of making himself look bigger, sighed, gave up, and slouched back into the main meeting room. He kept his gaze trained on his feet. Didn’t want to go making accidental eye contact with any of the poor sods in the cages.

He slunk to his seat, ignoring the way Kraglin had nervously chewed through his nails and started on the fingertips beneath. Marty sat between them, expression as impenetrable as his skin.

“I hope,” he told Yondu, from the corner of his mouth, “that your story is true. For your sake, old friend.”

The Collector took the seat behind the desk. He placed the container full of gloopy ex-Centaurian before him. At least the airtight seal meant they couldn’t smell Peashooter’s remains, although a pervasive waft of _death_ lingered under the Collector’s liberal spritzes of deodorizer.

“Ah,” he said, fluffing his bilgesnipe ruff up around his chin. “It seems they have arrived. Girls, if you would see to the door…?”

Here it came. Yondu steeled his jaw, tamped down on the panic as best he could, and prepared himself to face his worst nightmare, Round Two.

* * *

It went as poorly as could be expected.

Yondu’d figured that ripping off the band-aid was the best way to go about this, so as soon as Stakar set foot in the Collector’s neon-lit boudoir, he was treated to a mumble of “So I mighta sold a kid again…”

A storm front plowed across Stakar’s face. It crushed his eyebrows and stretched his snarl. As he grew, Yondu shrunk.

“Stakar, listen –“

“You sold a child?”

“You ain’t _listenin’ –_ “

“I thought,” said Stakar heavily, “that I could trust you. But I see you make a habit out of breaking hearts. Just as a bilgesnipe cannot change its horns, so too can a traitor never“ –

Aleta interjected herself into the conversation with an extravagant moan. “He said listen,” she pointed out, barging Stakar with her elbow. “He wouldn’t make the same mistake twice. We shouldn’t either.” Yondu regained an inch of his stature when she nodded to him. “Go on, brat.”

Under her sharp smirk there was a softness that made Yondu’s chest ache with a strange intensity. Like when he finally crept out of the bacta tank, smoother about the face but feeling more worn and battered than ever, and Stakar accosted him on his way to the eject pods and hauled him into the longest, bitterest hug of either of their lives.

But here they were. Giving him another chance.

Stakar rubbed his smarting side. “Go on,” he said gruffly. “I’m listening, son.”

Yondu refused to process that word. “You ever heard of a Centaurian nymph?” he asked.

* * *

Aleta tapped her chin. “What about the nymphs’ parents?”

Oh, stars. Yondu resisted the urge to drop his face into his hands.

He didn’t even want to _think_ about it. Had two hunters wound their way through the forest only to find an empty pond? Did they mourn? Were they grieving, even now?

The Collector shook his head. “From what I know of Centaurian culture, survival rates of nymphs are so low that the female typically lays her eggs in numerous ponds so that the male may fertilize them in batches. If one load is eaten, it’s no big loss. They only select the strongest four to pouch-rear, and of those, only one is likely to reach maturity.”

Yondu raised his head. “Fertilize… in ponds?”

The Collector didn’t seem to understand his confusion. “Yes?”

“So they don’t… y’know?”

Everyone was looking at him. Usually, Yondu liked being the center of attention – demanded it, even, and got sulky when the limelight turned off. But right now, he was surrounded by a bunch of people who professed to hate him until he took a quick dip in space; the people whose opinions he cared about possibly more than anyone else in the galaxy (with Quill’s lone exception, of course).

“No,” said the Collector, slow as if talking to a child. “They do not _y’know._ Centaurians do not engage in penetrative sex.”

Kraglin snort-laughed, but that was quickly rectified with a boot to the shin. Yondu tried for a grin. “You was sayin’?”

“They don’t have the _equipment._ I’m sure you’ve noticed.”

Yondu couldn’t help it. He knew he’d regret what he was about to say as soon as his mouth opened, but the words came out anyway, crackly with everything he didn’t want to admit. “Ya mean I’m… I’m _normal_?”

Kraglin’s giggles puttered out. The silence festered; it seemed like Marty and the others were holding their breath. Then Aleta stomped forwards and smacked the side of Yondu’s head.

“Ow! The hell, woman?”

“I didn’t request no invite to your pity party, Udonta. Save it for the therapist.”

Yondu rubbed the hand print, scowling at his lap. “Yes ma’am.”

On the inside, the revelations of the past five minutes whirled inside him like a typhoon. He wasn’t _defective._ Sure, he didn’t follow the standard genital-arrangement for bipedals, but all those years spent building up his bluster, convincing himself he didn’t give a fuck what he did or didn’t have in his pants and that no one else should care either, because he was gonna be the biggest, baddest pirate captain to scour the starways and he didn’t need nobody but himself…

Well, it now rung a little bit hollow.

He wasn’t a freak. So why the hell else would his parents take one look at him, the brat they plucked from a stagnant waterhole and deemed most likely to survive, only to hand him over to the Kree?

“Yondu?” Stakar prompted. He kept his voice artfully flat. Yondu couldn’t get a read on it, couldn’t tell whether Stakar was being swayed by his story or entrenching himself deeper in his determination that when they received Rocket’s emergency transmission from the _Quadrant –_ ‘ _Yondu dying, need med evac, now plz’_ – they should’ve gunned their thrusters in the opposite direction.

Yondu didn't think he could bear that.

He raised his gaze to the Collector instead. He at least was reliable, on account of always being a slimy bastard who Yondu wouldn't mourn if he accidentally fell into the cage of the flesh-eating Jthuoan slime worm at the back of the hall. “I didn’t know, did I? Tell ‘em. I didn’t know.”

The Collector steepled his fingers, observing the scene. The Ravager clan bosses in their dusty rainbow of leathers, fanned around Yondu and Kraglin and the canister of soupy sludge on his welcoming desk, still a little warm.

“No,” he said, after letting the silence simmer several minutes too long. “He most certainly did not. Neither did his Hraxian sidekick.”

Kraglin mumbled something about the two of them being an equal partnership now, but he didn’t push it. Yondu certainly didn’t.

“See?” he said to Stakar. “Weren’t no malish-ous intent.”

“And it was just the one,” the Collector agreed. “The odds of survival were stacked against it, especially taking Udonta’s general hygiene into account.” He shuddered. “Most likely, the poor thing would’ve perished from infection.”

...Yondu decided now would be a poor time to mention the bucket that sailed out the airlock.

He focused on Stakar, waiting for his verdict. He weren’t going to beg him for a place by his side – never again. But his eyes did enough of it that he didn’t have to open his mouth.

Stakar groaned. He rocked to his feet, pushing back his chair. “How do you manage to pull that off? You must be getting on for sixty _._ Puppy-eyes shouldn’t work.”

“I’m thirty-nine, boss.”

Kraglin nodded. “Like you been for the past ten years?”

But he grinned at Yondu, dipping him a nod. They were off the hook! If Stakar intended to banish them again, he wouldn’t be talking to them right now. Most likely, the bright blaze of solar wings would be the last thing either one of them saw.

Aleta poked Stakar’s chest. Somehow, despite her not exerting any visible effort, this brought him to a halt. “You’re really gonna let him get away with this?”

Oh hell. Yondu slumped, shoulders to belly (which he might’ve been sucking in, just a little, because whoever Stakar sold his soul to in order to look so trim despite his advanced years, Yondu wanted their number.)

Cruel though she might be, Aleta didn’t let him stew. She tapped Stakar on the sternum, and after a moment of grumpy posturing and a silent eyebrow conversation (“I’m the Admiral.” “No, _really?_ ”) he got out of her way.

“The profits from this porridge will hardly cover the fuel costs of your trip.”

“Hey,” Yondu protested weakly. “Don’t talk about my kid like that.”

That was another point. How was he supposed to tell Quill that, for approximately two cycles, he had a baby brother? (Sure, the Collector claimed the nymph was sexless, but that was bullshit, as far as Yondu was concerned. Call it paternal instinct.)

“If you’d done what we told you and extracted some of the stars-damned yaka ore,” Aleta continued, eyes sharp as Kraglin’s knives, “we wouldn’t be in this mess.”

“Not my fault. Kraglin dropped the mining gear in the first swamp we came to.” Kraglin shoved at his shoulder. “What?”

The vein besides Stakar’s eye had started to palpitate. “You two. I gave you _one simple job…_ ”

Aleta’s interruption had lured Yondu’s natural sass out of hiding, and now he gave it free rein. “Uh, no. You sent me to my old homeplanet, most likely to teach me some sorta stupid _lesson._ But ain’t you realized, Ogord? _I don’t learn!”_

Stakar, for some reason, was smiling. “I think you do,” he said.

“Don’t tell me what I do!” Stars, he wouldn’t have _thought_ of talking back to Stakar five minutes ago. But he was no long on the receiving end of that stars-awful neutral stare. Stakar had once more presided over his fate, and this time the verdict came back _not guilty._

A stupid part of Yondu wanted to jump up and punch the air like Quill used to when he was a kid. But he couldn’t do that in front of all the guys, and while the bacta had ironed a few of his wrinkles, it hadn’t quite magicked away the creak in his knees.

He settled on a grin instead. A big one.

“So that’s it?” he asked, nodding his thanks to the Collector. Still didn’t like the guy in any way, shape or form – much less his hobbies. But so long as you didn’t _think_ too hard about the people in the cages, that meant they didn’t matter. Right? Same as how Yondu used to stroll through slave markets, ire burning hot in his gut, but not put his arrow through every master’s eye. He looked out for his people, at the end of the day. Everyone else could figure it out from themselves.

Weren’t no hero, that was for sure. The whole galaxy-saving thing was a fluke.

Aleta replied before Stakar got the chance. “Hell no, brat. You owe us for that mining equipment. And for scarin’ us like that.”

“Think a round of drinks might do it,” agreed Charlie, who had rejected the offer of a chair out of concern that he’d snap it. “There’s gotta be some decent bars at this joint.”

“Or we could all go back to the _Starhawk!_ ” piped Mainframe, tucked under Krugarr’s arm. “Then none of us have to pay!”

Krugarr pointed at Stakar, who looked increasingly alarmed.

“Yes, I _know_ he supplies the drinks. But he’s rich! And he doesn’t mind – right, Stakar?”

“It’s more the damage that I’m concerned about. We haven’t drunk together in decades, and last time we did…”

“Charlie put Martinex through the wall,” Yondu recalls. Nostalgia blossoms, making his chest go all fuzzy and soft. “You guys didn’t keep partyin’? Y’know, after I…”

Best not put words to it. Putting words to it would make this whole hazy situation unreal.

And Yondu _should_ want to test it, should lash out and tryStakar’s patience and see how much it’d take to have him whirling around with starfire burning behind his eyes, snarling that Yondu was out for good. But he didn’t. He couldn’t. Because – what was it he told the Rat?

_Keep pushing everyone away, and one day they won’t come back._

Well, that day had been and gone. And now, impossibly, here they all were again. By his side.

“Weren’t nearly so fun,” said Aleta into the silence. “These guys are squares.”

Yondu's grin didn’t fade, even after Stakar cleared his throat and put on his Stern Face and reminded them that before they could get to the keg-diving, they had to sort Yondu and Kraglin’s next assignment. Seeing as they managed to fuck this easy-grade milk run, it promised to be very far from fun.

Yondu didn’t care. He was on a cloud. Walking through the fucking nebula. He was back where he belonged, Stakar was _listening_ to him, and nobody was jumping to stupid conclusions that ended with _no fireworks over your grave._

Kraglin kept glancing at the dead nymphlet, no doubt turning his part in its demise over and over in his head. But that was nothing another blowjob couldn’t solve.

Quill was off doing his own thing – but he’d be back soon enough, skulking into dock to check Yondu was still kicking. Might even bring his little friends. That could be fun. The beefcake, the freaky bug chick, and Quill’s sourpuss green squeeze – them Yondu could do without. But he wanted to know whether the Rat listened to all that wisdom he imparted before they crashed through Ego’s crust, and he’d been quietly amassing candies to buy the Twig’s love.

Shame he couldn’t introduce Peashooter to this big, snarled up mess they call a family. But hey. Last thing they needed was a surprise-pregnancy drama.

Yondu had booze to drink on Stakar’s tab. He had an ex-first mate and current-everything else to appease with plenty of mind-fizzling orgasms, and a debt to pay off before Aleta started threatening to shank him.

And if the question of _why_ a mommy and a poppy looked at their little boy, perfect as a fucking angel, and tossed him into the slave cages still churned in his brain… Well. 

That was past. Sometimes there weren’t no answers, and it only hurt worse the deeper you looked.

Yondu turned away from the Collector’s cages, towards the open door and the grungey Knowhere dawn. He looked at his old friends as they jostled around them, the seven of them falling into formation like they used to, only slightly hindered by arthritic hips.

And he looked at their eighth – Kraglin Obfonteri, loyallest idiot to paste himself to Yondu’s side, currently shooting shit with Martinex about how _no_ , his exeskelesuit didn't need any scientific upgrades, he could pick up Yondu and screw him just the way he liked, thanks for asking.

Yeah. Life was looking up.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Thank you all so much for sticking with me to the end! <3**

**Author's Note:**

> **Comments and kudos give me strength!**


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